SmartRemarks

And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure.

New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted.

I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful.

To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time.

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Open sewers run through the streets. Disease is rampant, up to and including recurring outbreaks of the plague. Criminals are routinely castrated, disemboweled, and hacked to pieces in public executions. The rotting heads of political enemies are mounted on public gates. The bloody torture of animals is a popular form of entertainment. Wretched poverty is commonplace. Literacy is not. Deference to a rigid caste system is expected of everyone. Weekly attendance at a church of the official religion is mandatory, with crippling fines imposed on those who abstain. Government censorship is taken for granted. Prejudice against foreigners and indeed against anyone even slightly divergent from the norm is encouraged.

Is this some third-world hellhole? Some imaginary world of dystopian fantasy?

No. This is England at one of its greatest historical moments, under the reign of its most esteemed monarch, Elizabeth the First. This is the England we romanticize and glorify and consider the forerunner of our own modern liberal democracy.

And astonishingly, almost miraculously, this is also the world that shaped the most brilliant literary mind in human history. This culture that would be alien and repulsive to us were we suddenly to find ourselves in it, stripped of the cleansing distance of centuries, somehow gave rise to a visionary who crafted timeless works that speak to us today every bit as much as they did to audiences four hundred years ago. A man whose artistic insight encompassed not just linguistic invention but social dynamics, personal psychology, and humanist philosophy.

How is this possible?

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