For two centuries we’ve believed in history as a highway which was taking us to a future such as nobody had every known before. We thought we were exempt. When we walked through the galleries of the old palaces and saw all those massacres and last rites and decapitated heads on platters, all painted and framed on the walls, we told ourselves we had come a long way - not so far that we couldn’t still feel for them, of course, but far enough to know that we’d been spared. Now people live to be much older. There are anaesthetics. We’ve landed on the moon. There are no more slaves. We apply reasoning to everything. Even to Salome dancing. We forgave the past its terrors because they occurred in the Dark Ages. Now suddenly we find ourselves far from any highway, perched like puffins on a cliff ledge in the dark.
I can’t fly.
You’ve never flown, even in a dream?
Perhaps.
- John Berger
