A Novel View of The Future

As I reflect back on the past year, much that transpired was as I hoped, and much of the rest was more or less as expected. That, in any given year, is itself as expected; for were surprises to occur often enough, they would cease to be surprising.

I do end the year with a disquieting surprise on the personal front. My magnificent four-hooved friend, Troubadour, was perfectly sound last Wednesday morning, and in emergency surgery for colic last Thursday night (Christmas Eve). When I watched his legs buckle under him, saw him unable to lift the weight of his own head, my anguished thoughts turned to a scene in the movie, Remember the Titans, when Julius says to Gary in his hospital bed: you can’t be hurt, you’re Superman! This intimate confrontation with the vulnerability in Troubadour’s great strength makes me love and appreciate him all the more. I am pleased to report that thus far, his postoperative recovery is going very well.

The singular surprise of the year, however, was the controversial interlude through which I blundered with my first foray into fiction writing, the epic fantasy, reVision. To the extent the blunder was mine, I have atoned by all means at my disposal. To the extent the episode was really a malevolent charade by others with ulterior motives, the tale has been told, and the shame is theirs.

Leaving that behind, then, the novel itself is germane to this seasonal juncture, which is as much a solstice of spirit as star. The pitch of the planet casts our sun to the extreme of its arc; the pent up aspirations of our common humanity do the same to hope. In our part of the planet, days are short and darkness dominates the sky. Even so, the brightness of spirit is commensurate, and more.

I did not write reVision for a purpose, a confession I presume to be shared with most novelists. A story asserts itself, or it does not; characters animate it and tell their tale, or lie silent and still. There is a passive element to story telling; the novelist’s role is, as far as I can tell, more a matter of permission than purpose.

But that does not deny purpose to the story. If the characters have cause to tell their story in the first place, they have purposes to share, and causes to convey. The story itself may be redolent with purpose unknown at first to the conscripted author, as I believe and hope mine to be. reVision, ostensibly an epic, fantasy adventure involving the inevitable conflict on a cosmic scale, is home to my most fervent hopes and restive purposes.

As an enthusiast of great fantasy adventure and classic science fiction, I cannot fail to notice the turn our communal imagination has taken. Look around at the alternatives to our reality, and visions of our possible future that populate our fictional accounts, and dystopias abound. From Interstellar, to Hunger Games; Terminator to Maze Runner to Insurgent, there is scorched earth, and the bequests of self-inflicted apocalypse.

Superficially, this is art imitating life, a reflection of our amply justified worry. The flight of even imagination, after all, must push off the solid ground of experience. That ground these days is all too often pock-marked with the causes and consequences of calamity, incipient and otherwise, from drought in California, to civil war in Syria; mass shootings, melting glaciers, and the submersion of island nations. I write this just a few days after the warmest Christmas Eve ever recorded in the Northeastern United States.

Reality is reason for worry. But there is the ominous prospect that fictional alternatives are themselves cause as well as effect. Is there any hope of avoiding the only fate we seem capable of seeing?

We are bounded by our vision. I have always found inspiration in the adage, attributed variously to Buckminster Fuller or Abraham Lincoln, as orphaned epiphanies so often are: the best way to predict the future is to create it. But can we hope to create what we fail to imagine?

Whatever its parentage, the insight is a cause for concern in a world of so many woes. We are, indeed, terrorized by terrorism, and alarmingly inclined to blame and punish its most intimate victims for the propagation of our fears. We are indeed consuming the vital resources of our planet, as our children look on at the treasure of their rightful inheritance, squandered.

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson (if not Jessamyn West), fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. Of course, he might have been writing fiction at the time, but assuming not, a dystopian bent to even our diversions is ostensibly dire. It reveals the outcomes we actually fear too much to acknowledge directly.

Acknowledge, and confront them we must. In so doing, our armament will include our customary ingenuity and resourcefulness, veritable trademarks of our irrepressible breed. But perhaps it must include that most fitful aspect of our fortitude as well, that thing with feathers: hope.

As reVision took shape of its own accord, it became a home to my every hope. The possibility of conflict in the absence of evil, and resolution conjoined to revelation. The prospect of genuine understanding across the great divides of culture, ideology, faith, and gender. Life in balance with the bounties of nature. A reconciliation of magic with mechanism, religion with science. A place where illumination for its own sake is the most sacred of currencies.  

reVision is just a story. There is passion and pathos, loyalty and love, honor and anguish. Resolve is tried, and faith is tested. Good people and their planets are caught up ineluctably in conflict, and fates must unfold accordingly.

But as we are at our best, they are good people. For them as we wish for ourselves, there is ample, unscorched space for fates to unfold as they should. There are heights, perhaps not easily scaled, but with purchase for better destinies committed to them.

My friend Troubadour is convalescing, courtesy of veterinary skill and expertise encountered in the operating room and since. But it was hope, and belief in the better expressions of possibility, that consigned his fate to those expert hands in the first place.

A year winds to its close on a world of worry and woe. But if hope is that flighty, feathered thing, it may wing its way back as well as away. The future that beckons invites not mere prediction, but creation. Creation in turn issues from our breadth of vision. Vision itself may be revised to fly compatibly with hope. And hope may shrug off its encumbrances to soar with the better angels of our nature, or even just imaginary characters we might wish to be, toward a novel view of the future.

-fin    

David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital
President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Founder, The True Health Initiative

Follow at: LinkedIN; Twitter; Facebook
Read at: INfluencer Blog; Huffington Post; US News & World Report; About.com