Dear Luna,
You once posed a question I found difficult to answer. I approached it sideways with anxiety, knowing the many ways the adults of today, and those before them, have both gloriously succeeded and spectacularly failed the enterprise.
You asked, If we were to create a new nation, how might we begin?
I am thinking now of the Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who in 2010 demanded ‘dignity before bread’ before igniting the fuel that would produce the Thermopylae of his generation.
I recall an entry the poet Vera Inber made in her diary in 1941, while Leningrad reeled from the monstrosities of war.
‘I am moved,’ Inber wrote, ‘by the thought that while the bombs rain down on this besieged city, Shostakovich is writing a symphony … And so, in all this horror, art is still alive. It shines and warms the heart.’
We dwell too much on the thunderclaps of history that we sometimes miss the minutiae of human agency, our oxygen, the things that define who we are and who we ought to be.
This much is true: listlessness is not unique to your generation just as restlessness did not begin nor end with mine. And this, too: it is normal to gain your bearings while losing your marbles.
I wonder what I can tell you that you don’t already know.
I am aware that we are bound by common truths. The ecumenical joy of open windows and a pinch of salt. The grace of Gandhi, the Force and Jimi Hendrix. The gift of Bette Midler, Bonnie Raitt, Susan Sontag and Steve Sawyer.
We know the great sky as the heavens or a short stretch of atmosphere, and that it is blue or dark depending on the time of day. We know the sun nourishes living and that stars are immortal, because as Captain Alatriste tells us, life is long until it ends.
Meantime, seas rise and reclaim entire coastlines, fields wither or drown, and mountains fall in heaps on whole villages as monstrous things burn and dig and burn.
I wonder how we got here, this point where we can imagine the end of the world but not the end of the dictatorship of consumption and accumulation?
The eminent scientist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in 1994 that the word dinosaur should actually be ‘a term of praise, not of opprobrium. They reigned for 100 million years and died through no fault of their own. [But] Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity.’
We know Gould is right. We are aware of the great danger we face together but we seem intent on courting it.
And so our war is with ourselves − with the amber of our indifference and the obstinate refusal to recognise the annexation of who we are and who we ought to be.
A transcendence, then. A self-surpassing. An awareness of our place in what Barbara Kingsolver called ‘the sovereignty of the animate land that feeds us and shelters us’. A confrontation with the choice of whether we shall abide by life’s ruins and live the sanctioned life − or face the moral reckoning of our age.
There is really only one investigation all along, wrote the novelist Michael Chabon, ‘one search with a sole objective: a home, a world to call my own’.
We are not so different, you and me, not as distant from one another as the decades that separate us. We are both searching for continuities and the elusive reboot.
For all the days when outrage starts to feel like calendared indignation, for the sheer number of mistakes repeated so many times it makes you wonder if we as a species are ever capable of truly learning, there are days that reward us with renewable joy: when love rules, when wisdom wins, when humility prevails over the conceit of our certainties.
So think of an island, my dear Luna, an island travelling south, a landscape on the move where compassion is the currency and solidarity the only debt people owe one another, a house of memory built with hope.
If you can imagine such a nation, you should know that I live there. And so do you.
Love,
Tatay