A Tale of Two Realities
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . . ”
Once upon a time, I was a white, middle-class kid of the 1980s. In the dull, sleeping giant of privileged complacency called The United States of America.
We had no idea that we would one day be either an unthinking cog in the machine working to destroy humanity, or wake up to find ourselves screaming in an emerging dystopia.
Some of us probably knew or imagined. Some saw the writing on the wall.
Margaret Atwood did.*
Kids living on the margins probably assumed it always had been this way and always would.
But so many kids, too many, just like me, were fast asleep, existing in mundanity. Surviving, suffering, thriving, dying, in a walled-off pseudo-reality called America.
I don’t know if more stories and better stories would have spared the world this careening toward disaster. And I don’t know if they can spare us now.
Perhaps humanity needs to struggle through this technological adolescence and mass injustice in order to finally learn.
But I hope, I believe . . . that the enormity, diversity, and accessibility of literature for everyone just might give us a shot.
As dark as things may sometimes seem, books, and the stories they tell, truly are shining beacons of hope. Hope that we are not alone. Hope that we are ok. Hope that if we can understand what it’s like for someone else, we can reach across the gap in lived reality and grasp hands–work together to not only survive this world, but love it and live fully in it.
As Rudine Sims Bishop wrote in her iconic essay, Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors, “
References:
Bishop, Rudine Sims. The Ohio State University. Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. Vol. 6, no. 3. Summer 1990. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/98/pg98-images.html
*Penguin. Margaret Atwood on the real-life events that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. 9 September, 2019. https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-testaments-real-life-inspiration