t was just the other day a weird thought popped into my head. (Quiet in the back.) I was trying to remember something and I thought, 'I cannot quite remember.' That triggered a memory that made me laugh.

The reason that I was laughing was that the denizens of the 21st are always and forever calling each other 'snowflakes' in an attempt to disparage the authenticity of one another's reactions to stimuli. If you're 'triggered' by the mention of this or that, particularly in an artistic setting, then you're either 'woke' or 'a snowflake', depending on whom you're talking to.

And let's be upfront about it: different people are 'triggered' by different things. Just as in Mark Twain's day, he and his friends would cheerfully use language among themselves that would cause sensitive city folk to swoon. They swooned back then because they didn't know how to be triggered.

Anyway, one of the things that the 21st-century folk have taught this time traveller is that, while it's absolutely okay to let kids read about sex and gender, they should on no account be exposed to death, because death is yucky and we don't want to think about it. Old age is yucky, too, because it reminds people in the 21st that they won't always have youth advantage going for them. Besides, facial wrinkles are unaesthetic.

I discovered all this in that most reliable of settings, social media. The millennials there are fond of comparing traumas induced by literature. From their discussions, I have gleaned that certain made-for-children books and movies were the source of childhood trauma because they depicted the death of a family pet. The only one I recognised was Old Yeller. I did not like Old Yeller as a kid, but that had nothing to do with the death of the dog, which I considered a natural part of the story. I was never that fond of frontier-kid stories.

None of which explains why I was laughing at the thought of kids and being 'triggered.' That was because the phrase 'I cannot quite remember' reminded me of this poem:

"I cannot quite remember. . . There were five

Dropt dead beside me in the trench – and three

Whispered their dying messages to me. . . "


Back from the trenches, more dead than alive,

Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee,

He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly. . .

– Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, 1917

Our teacher read that poem to us when I was about nine or ten years old, and I have never forgotten it. The haunting poem about the man who couldn't quite remember the messages entrusted to him by the dead. . . It will make you antiwar. And it will make you pay attention to poetry. Back then, it made me pay more attention to the old people who had stories from Over There, too.

Maybe the real danger in allowing too much reality into children's literary experiences is that they might see through the adults prematurely. I will admit it had that effect on me. I tended to be fairly skeptical of adults. I was always polite to them, but if they failed to pass the bullshit test I didn't take what they said too seriously.

My mind has been preoccupied lately with the thought that my fellow-citizens here in the US of A may have triggered the soundless apocalypse. Certainly, if things are followed to their logical conclusion, the universe may find an answer to the age-old question: if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody left to hear it, does it make a sound? I'm betting there will be a woodchuck or two left to tell the story about the extinct species that used to believe woodchucks could predict weather.

Because I have a truly bizarre mind, thoughts of Armageddon make me think of Lieutenant Commander Data of the starship Enterprise. My favourite show in that series, hands down, is the one where they repeatedly blow up the ship – the first time, even before the opening credits. I vividly remember seeing this one for the first time back in the 90s.

The Enterprise, it seems, is caught in a temporal causality loop – one that is triggered every time Kelsey Grammer shows up out of a wormhole and rams them. Every time they go through the loop, the bridge officers have to puzzle out their dilemma all over again. And every time, the damned ship blows up before they can work out the proper response.

Finally, Data comes up with an idea. Realising that they're in a loop and have done this horrible thing gods-knows-how-many times already, he determines to send himself a message, one that will persist across the barrier thrown up by the disturbance in the spacetime continuum. He can do this because he's an android and blah-blah-trekolalalia, but he can only send himself a really short message. At the last possible nanosecond (he's an android, remember?) he sends himself the number 3 because Commander Riker, who had the right suggestion, has three pips on his shoulder. . .

Ship saved.

I don't know if you've noticed, but human civilisations tend to last, at most, about a thousand years. The ones that last that long seem to age out, like ancient oaks. They collapse gently, leaving their wisdom to the future. And then there are civilisations like ours. Yuck, as the kids would say.

We appear to be in danger of going out with a bang rather than a whimper, meaning that we will at least be spared the fatuous New York Times headline about TS Eliot's finally being proven wrong. But I have a question. You might be able to guess what it is.

If you could send one short message to the future, what would it be? What would you tell them that would help them to avoid making the same mistakes? How would you advise them to live so that they could honour the amazing gift the universe has given them – life, and all that goes with it?

I'm not a great fan of Camelot. Most of it is either too silly or not silly enough for a 20th-century take on the Matter of Britain. But one thing about the musical always makes my spine tingle. It's the scene at the end where Arthur entrusts the story to a boy named Tom of Warwick. It's his job to remind people that 'for one brief shining moment,' there was something great going on. I'm feeling like that, right about now.

Now, don't get me wrong: we're not giving up. As Awix wrote to me today, 'All the darkness in the world can't put out a single candle, so keep a few burning.' We intend to do that. But if push comes to shove, and we're about to get on that boat for Avalon, what would you want to tell Tom of Warwick? Make it something good.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

03.03.25 Front Page

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