The Ones Who Saw it Coming

My friends. My old and dear friends. I want to speak to you today from a place in the soul. Stay here with me for a moment. We are going to sit by the fire and talk about you, me, us, them, the world, and the terrible pain, the agony, we are all in right now.

I spent the day alone. Preparing to launch Havens. And a thought crept into me. A feeling, dark as winter. It’ll be just another failure, a little demon in me said. He laughed. My soul shivered. I felt as cold as the snow on the crest of a peak.

I’ve heard it from you in sessions lately. Many of you. So many, so much so, that it’s become a theme. I’m a failure. Now, I want you to laugh with me. Here I am, feeling like a failure, too. And you know all the things I’ve done. As my wife says, you’ve accomplished more in half a life than most will in ten. I chuckle. Laugh with me. Let it out. 

Let this feeling go. It is coming from a place not within us, but outside us. And today we’re going to talk about it. 

Do you know what we are? Who we are?

We are the ones who saw it coming. We saw it all. Collapse. Implosion. Violence, enmity. Rage. Ignorance. Stupidity. A world unravelling.

We saw the great wheel of time turning until at last there was a crack. Broken upon its axle. It lay there, in piece. Stuck fast, in the winter snow. 

And now here we are. In this place. A pathetic, ugly, obscene one. Is it the 1930s? Is it 1929? Is it the 1890s? Where are we, in time, now? We are now outside time. The wheel is broken. We are repeating all of history’s greatest mistakes is what I mean by that, all at once. Fascism, check. Imperialism, check. Greed, check. Conflict, war, hatred, check, check, check.

And as the wheel of time broke, something in us broke, too. The ones who saw it coming.

To see a thing coming is a terrible fate. Cassandra’s ghost walked with me, today, through my loneliness and despair. And from somewhere deep in the woods, I heard Orpheus sing, a song torn open with heartbreak. I will tell you about it.

You and I are the ones who saw it coming. We are the artists, poets, intellectuals, scientists, thinkers, journalists, etcetera. We knew. And to see a thing coming, an awful thing, a cataclysm, an apocalypse, what does it do to one? What does it make of one? The Oracles spoke in riddles, so they could never be misunderstood. The meaning of all the riddles was: human folly is an eternal winter.

We knew because it is our job to know. Not in a trivial sense. In a profound one. An existential task. A moral duty. What is the task of an artist? To sense the emotions of a world, perhaps all worlds. Of an intellectual? To understand, and therefore, to know. Of a scientist? To know, and therefore to predict and explain. It was our task to know, and this is how we are the ones who saw it coming.

They did not. Let us not speak of them. They don’t deserve much of us anymore. Is it our contempt they deserve? Our pity? Our scorn? Here, too, our souls are bereft. We do not know how to relate to a world that has scorned us. Scorned us for knowing. I wish I could tell you that there is an easy answer. There isn’t. Our relationship with the world is now broken, fatally so. 

The price of being the ones who know has been high, my friends. Too high. As the wheel of time broke, something in us, did, too.

You see, when it is our existential duty and task to know, and the world says, laughing, you are the fool, everything will be fine, there’s nothing to worry about, alarmist, idiot, doomer, insert your modern day insult, think of Socrates drinking the hemlock—when that is our task, and we fulfill that task, by knowing, and yet the wheel breaks anyways, through the abject, crushing folly we see around us today, how do we feel?

We feel that we have failed. And no matter how much our conscious minds reassure us—our unconscious minds are trapped in this loop. We knew. We tried. They chose a cataclysm. They sowed salt on the harvest, laughing and dancing. We failed.

Our unconscious is not like their unconscious. The unconscious mind of people like us, artists, poets, intellectuals, scientists—it couldn’t be more different. It is oriented in a nobler and truer way. Why do we do the things we do? Why don’t we just make money, go to the gym, get wasted, and pass out? I’m caricaturing a kind of person, it’s unfair. But perhaps you understand my point. Our deepest motivations and desires and wishes are different.

We wish little for ourselves. Perhaps there is a spark of egotism or narcissism here. If I paint a masterpiece, discover something groundbreaking, write that novel, then I will be rich and famous. But these are conscious thoughts. No sensible person would be one of us if they could choose not to. Devoting your life to knowledge, art, truth, reason, justice? These are futile pursuits. LOL, nobody’s becoming a billionaire this way. If you’re a fascist, apparently, you have a pretty good shot, though. Sartre said it best: “man is a useless passion.”

And this is where we begin, at last, to understand ourselves. Our work is futile, in the sense that it will be taken for granted, dark ages will fall, and in that long winter, everything we have accomplished will be undone. It has always has been like that. And yet. Isn’t it true that we save countless people from a scourge like polio? Isn’t it true that our music and art lifted souls through the darkest times in their lives? Isn’t it true that science, art, literature, law, reason—these things matter, and they matter the most?

Of course it’s true.

And in all this, we confront the tragedy of ourselves. 

The work we do is the important work of all, but it will never be valued or recognized as it should be by them. Never. Socrates. Galileo. Van Gogh. They will all tell you about that. In that contradiction lies all politics, all conflict, all folly, all ignorance. All of it. The economist in me will tell you how valuable the work we do is. It is what truly creates “growth.” But I’m tired of talking about money. Fuck Havens, I say to myself, sometimes. I’m interested in existence, in its terrible, endless pain, in the nobility and beauty of the only redemption there is, which is love.

And this is who we are. We are the ones who saw it coming, because we had the courage to love. Not in a trite sense. I love designer handbags! Wow, I love this idiotic superhero movie! Wow, I love this guy on TikTok! Sure, that’s nice, that’s fine, fucking grow up for calling this “love.” To love in our sense, to love virtue, to love a larger us, so much so we devote our lives to this endeavor—that takes an immense kind of courage. A strength that just does not exist in the them that chose this path of ruin.

You must give this gift to yourself. You must never think of yourself as a failure. You must see how strong and brave and courageous you have been. I know many of you. You are all accomplished, learned, intelligent, sane, kind, decent, beautiful people. I am proud of you.

Leave this burden to me. I will accept it. If anyone has failed, it’s me. I’m the one with the followers, the fans, etcetera. Place it on my shoulders, if you place it on anyone’s. LOL, I made zero impact whatsoever in all of my warnings. I share with you sometimes how ill it has left me.

We are now haunted, the ones who saw it coming. We.

But I want you to see the ghosts who stand there with us in our moments of despair and loneliness and guilt and shame.

Cassandra. Sartre. Camus. Socrates. Aristotle. There is Dante, by their side, and Virgil, alongside him. Cicero, the last great Roman, stands beside. The prophets and the great saints, the scientists and the seers, the great minds and souls of history. They felt what we feel, having been the ones who knew, and paid the price, which is eternal, because human folly is. 

We are not alone. I know how lonely you feel right now. I sense it deep in my bones. Let me take this feeling from you, and tell you a great and beautiful secret.

They are all here with us. Can you name me a single one who wasn’t disappointed, bereft, haunted, heartbroken, in the way we are now? Who didn’t feel what we feel right now? If you read Camus’s notebooks, you will find that he, too felt the same way. So much, that he crashed his car, in an accident. Was it one? The 20th century’s greatest mind of all, in my estimation, felt this pain so deeply that he could scarcely bear it. 

This pain you feel, that I feel, is an honorable and beautiful and noble one. It is not an empty one. I know that it makes you feel emptier than a frozen desert, high in the mountains. I know that feel laced by the wind. I feel it from your soul. We are old friends. 

This pain is what links us to the ghosts of history’s greatest minds and souls, who stand beside us now. It is how history’s wheel may turn again. It is the unbroken line stretching back through the eons, to the ancestor who spoke the first words, to the one who first mapped the stars, to the one who sang the first song. 

The ones who saw it coming throughout time, are all here with us, the ones who saw it coming this time. And they are here not just to teach us and guide us, but first, just to help lift us up. They take us by the arm, as we slip, as we crumble, weary, and say: how am I to exist now, that I have failed, in an existential way, at the things that I cared most about, at this highest form of love?

Ah, my friends. If only love were that simple. Love is redemption, but it is an imperfect kind. We will always lose the ones we love. And the greater our capacity for love, so, too, the more we are bound to be disappointed. The wider our moral circle and and the deeper our moral imagination, so too, the joined hands shudder and tense and break. We must never imagine that merely loving someone can save them from the terror and pain of existence. Each must walk through the winter, to arrive at the shore. That is the tragedy of life, too.

And no matter how we have tried to guide them, there they are, going in circles, in the winter. Fuck Havens, I say to myself. What good is it, that this foolish little portfolio makes “a lot of money,” when it does nothing that really matters? Are we going to just profit off of the collapse of everything we hold dear, or try to change it? Have I become the kind of numb, empty useless thing that I never wanted to be, in this way?

Yet this is the very motivation and question that makes us different. Here we are, barely holding on. This feeling in us, that I have failed, you have failed, we have failed—it says that we still care in an existential way about civilization. This is love in its highest form. Amidst this winter of the human soul, that ember still burns bright. All the ghosts of those who saw it coming whisper: protect it, nurture it, guard it. It is all that we have.

I will shoulder the burden of being a failure. It is never yours. You must now understand what it is to be one of the ones who saw it coming. It is all these things. Grief, beauty, pain, futility, bitterness, emptiness, need, longing. And these things feel like a burden. But they have given you depth like a sea. Truth like a river. They have broken you open like spring. Now, at last, you stand in the great line unbroken through the eons, of the ones who know. There is nothing more honorable and beautiful than that.

So you are not alone in these things. Never have you been. This pain can only be borne in one way. You must let the ghosts of history who stand beside us hold you close, and lift you up. They are the only ones who can.

Today, in my loneliness, in my terrible grief, staggering, soul-sick, Cassandra whispered to me: can you hear Orpheus singing? The birds stood still. Even the leaves stopped rustling. Not a sound was to be heard, so beautiful was his song. He sang: you must never look back. I have lost all I love. The Lord of the Underworld took from me all that I wanted, because I couldn’t let go. He sang: do you understand, my child, the message in my mistake? This is what love truly is, and where all truth begins.

I’m proud of you, my friends. I always hold you close.

Umair (and Snowy!)

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