Twenty years ago

[malsperanza]

In Rome, everyone huddled around the TV to watch the Wall come down. We said, Let's go to Berlin for New Year's, it'll be the party of the century. But the trains were already all booked solid, and no one knew anyone we could crash with, so we went to Paris instead.

Then, a month later, a frigid end-of-year night, everyone huddled around the TV again, as if it were a hearth, to watch live as Ceaucescu and his wife were tried and executed. It's like watching the French Revolution, we said. Yes, but what a grotesque mockery of a trial, we said.

And then, two months after that, on TV, Mandela walking free out of Robbin Island prison. Such joy! I felt something like it, in a way, the night Obama was elected, just a year ago. A reminder that good things can happen in the dark, short, cold days at year's end.

And yet I wonder if, exactly 100 years ago, in November 1909, people could imagine what was to come in August 1914. Were there reasons to know it would happen, or was it unimaginable in that little pocket of peace and progress between the wars of the 1860s and 1870s and the cataclysm that brought down the British Empire? We have scarcely begun our new century, after all.

Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919 and published it in November 1920.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Still, the fall of the Wall: that was the real millennium: 20 years ago--the change of centuries came a decade early, just as, in the previous century, it had come 14 years late. And if the actual Millennium didn't bring us everything we hoped, it hasn't yet brought us all that we feared. Lots still to celebrate.

Happy Fall of Wall, everyone!

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