14 October
Sayer says I should keep a journal. It isn’t for them, you’ll understand, she was clear about that; the official record is kept elsewhere, in somebody else’s hand. It’s for me. She said it the way you’d recommend a book to a restless man, and since I am a man who is clearly restless, I have bought a diary, this one, and here I am at the kitchen table at an unreasonable hour, writing the first honest sentences I’ve managed in a year.
So, the facts. Since I spent thirty-one years telling students to start with the facts, I will do so too.
I am retired, but I used to study the points in history where the human race could have leapt forward and didn’t. These I called breakpoints, which was a bit of a reach, but the idea is simple. Every so often, we get within arm’s reach of something that could change everything, and then we drop it, or burn it, or forget it, and the world goes quiet for a few hundred years as if it had never happened at all. I gave a lecture about it for most of my career. Lord knows why, it wasn’t very impressive, just a shopping list of what-ifs. I refrained from connecting the dots because that wasn’t a territory in which academia dwelt comfortably. Instead, I left the theme as ‘missed opportunities’. Most of my audience wanted more than that damp squib. I demurred to make more of it than light scrapings of an archaeologist’s trowel revealed. My audience came expecting something insightful and left looking like they’d watched a summer news item on a particularly slow week. I was July hailstones in East Anglia.
Sayer came to the last lecture, and she didn’t look bored. Noticeably so. At least to me, anyway. Afterwards, she asked whether it had ever struck me that the losses I listed were too tidy to be bad luck. I said yes, I had. Not in my daily life, and nothing I would commit to paper. But I thought about it at three in the morning, when I sat in my armchair, trying to cool off my overheated limbs, and my mind would wander to the possibilities of a guiding hand. Of course, I would tell myself off for such asinine thoughts. I was, after all, a serious academic, albeit one with an admittedly fading standing. Then I would slap my legs, mutter the obligatory “right”, and determine that I would get on with my latest paper, the one that had been sitting in my drawer for twenty years and forget about such frippery.
That’s when she dropped her hammer blow. She said that she ran an organisation that took the silly thoughts I’d been having seriously. They kept files, and she’d like to show me what was in them.
I should have said no. Indeed, I keep looking for the moment I could have said no, and I can’t find it. There was no door I walked through. It was just a long, slow ramp, and every step of it felt inevitable. Just like my breakpoints.