'What She or He Ought to Know'

In a typically mordant essay, “A Great Fog Over the Past,” Peter Hitchens cites “Spanish Waters,” a poem by John Masefield, one of the first poets I claimed as my own when a boy, years before Eliot and Yeats. The poem’s “decrepit beggar,” as Hitchens puts it, “knows where the buried treasure is but cannot hope to reach it before he dies in destitution.” I hope I'm not being too reductive but the beggar’s fate recalls my brother’s, alone and sick in a hospice in Cleveland, relieved only by frequent doses of synthetic opiates. I’m flying back there on Sunday. Until rereading Masefield’s poem, the only literary counterparts to Ken’s situation I could recall were some of Samuel Beckett’s characters, minus most of the humor.     

“It’s not the way to end it all. I'm old, and nearly blind,

And an old man's past's a strange thing, for it never leaves his mind.”

 

There’s more to Hitchens’ essay than Masefield’s metaphors. Hitchens unapologetically mourns the loss of the past and the shoddy goods that have succeeded it. His musing should not be mistaken for self-indulgent nostalgia: “This would be a wonderful opportunity to muse on the disappearance of paraffin stoves, steamrollers, signal boxes, and collar studs, but it is language, popular culture, and knowledge that I am more worried by.”

 

Among the things forgotten and perhaps lost are the works of Arthur Koestler. He was a giant, especially for Darkness at Noon (1940), a rare work of literature that changed the world. It’s his fictional account of the Great Purge conducted by Stalin and his thugs. Hitchens ties together his theme of willful memory loss at the end of his essay:

 

“. . . I think Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly.”