Pylimitics

The Dark Tower , Stephen King’s multivolume epic, takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting he describes with “the world had moved on.” Everything fell apart. Nobody knew why, but nearly everything people depended on simply stopped working and went into decline and decay. Full disclosure: I’ve read some of the series but not all of it. But this is not about the plot; it’s about the feeling of the saga.

The main character, somewhat inexplicably is a gunslinger right out of a cowboy movie (the first title in the series is The Gunslinger). All the other characters exist in a degrading world that’s getting worse, and they can’t seem to do anything about it. In fact I don’t recall many of them even trying to do anything about it. The gunslinger is working on it, of course, but it takes him thousands of pages to manage it. I still remember the feeling King was able to conjure up of a crumbling world, fragments of bygone systems and machines that don’t work anymore, hints of a past that was more orderly and functional, when everything was more understandable that it’s become.

It’s a not-quite-awake feeling, when you’ve come partially to your senses but the dream world lingers and the sense of it and the sense of the real world swirl together. Nothing is quite right but you can’t yet grasp how or why.

Cory Doctorow wrote about this very thing a couple of days ago; it’s what put me in mind of the feeling of The Dark Tower. He mentions a writer for The Guardian being “…deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now…” The connection to The Dark Tower originated with one of those emails.

I understand how the world can feel different now. But for me, at least, it’s not a new feeling. There have been many times in my life when things have shifted, usually on a scale far beyond me, and I felt it as a shift in the world itself. I eventually realized that most of the events that lead to that feeling have been betrayals. Not personal betrayals, but betrayals of things I was taught and, perhaps naively, believed. Human nature. The uniqueness of the United States. That “progress” is a good thing. That the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Justice itself.

And yet…on a personal, individual, local level, I don’t have that feeling. Not at all. The people I know and talk to are not different now. They display the best parts of human nature. They’re reliable. I trust them. They still understand things, and work on improvements. And improvements actually happen, even when they’re difficult.

We don’t live in the world of The Dark Tower, and there are no mysterious cosmic forces that can be disrupted to make our world “move on.” But there are such forces in our world. The forces are us.

Be glad and confident.