Written at the Quarter Mark of the 21st Century

In 1942, Stefan Zweig took his own life, martyred to the world of yesterday.

The twentieth century began, unsettlingly, with conquest across the globe and the upheaval of quantum theory. The afterglow of the French Revolution in 1789, the winds of freedom from the Springtime of Peoples in 1848—all faded into the distance. The shadow of steel, germs, and gunpowder had already begun to darken Europe, and the world entire.

Sissi died by an assassin’s file. As she fell by the shores of Lake Geneva, perhaps she was still thinking of her mad cousin at Neuschwanstein—Ludwig II. They were people who never should have lived to see the twentieth century. In 1898, Sissi died; in 1918, the Habsburg dynasty, which had endured for centuries, collapsed like a snow-laden roof in a single night. The “world of yesterday” that Zweig mourned, the Imperial Theatre of Vienna—that was this world.

During the same era, Sven Hedin was still trudging through the sands of the Taklamakan, afflicted with the romantic fever of Victorian explorers, searching for the lost Loulan. He could not have known that decades later he would stand beside a Nazi podium, or that the very land he had crossed would soon be consumed by another kind of fire—the smoke of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. The final afterglow of the Age of Discovery was, in the end, extinguished in a century of iron and blood.

Hemingway said Paris was a moveable feast. He learned to write there, shouldered a rifle for the Republic in Spain, fished and drank on the balcony in Cuba. That was how people of that era lived: in the trenches of Madrid, volunteers from the International Brigades came from fifty-three countries, dying for the freedom of others. In 1961, Hemingway ended it all with the shotgun his father had left him.

In 1900, David Hilbert presented twenty-three problems that humanity ought to solve at the turn of the century. “We must know, we shall know.” Thirty-one years later, a young man named Gödel proved them all unprovable. Hilbert died in 1943, in Nazi Germany. The once-glorious mathematics department at Göttingen was nothing more than an empty husk.

As if waking from a dream one does not wish to leave, humanity crossed the threshold of the twentieth century, stumbling from the classical world into the modern one. Before the twentieth century were countless generations who lived as if they had not lived at all; after the twentieth century are postmodern people who no longer know that they are alive.

The twenty-first century offers nothing thrilling; everything seems merely the inheritance of an age of galloping excess. The second half of the twentieth century was still ablaze with unceasing revolutionary fervor. The 1960 Anpo protests; the May ‘68 storms in Paris; the 1970 anti-Vietnam War marches; the Carnation Revolution of 1974; the German Autumn of 1977; the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979; the Gwangju Democratization Movement of 1980; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was an era that believed history stood on its side. Looking back now, some have become legend, some tragedy, and some both.

“We traveled without passports or visas, going wherever we wished. No one examined our thoughts, our origins, our race, or our faith.” Even the peer-to-peer openness of the internet, it seems, has now progressed to the point of requiring visas. If only we could flee together—but where would we go? Tokyo, Beijing, New York, Shanghai, London, Hong Kong—what difference is there between them? In Kundera’s time, one could at least take comfort that there was still an elsewhere; now we know, through the glowing rectangles in our palms, that everywhere is the same.

What should I remember, or still be able to write? Even trying to list what this century has given us to oppose feels futile, like throwing a punch at cotton. The twenty-first century has truly offered nothing to resist.