Sunday, 6th January 1901
I don’t know why I’ve started writing. I don’t know who you are. I don’t even know what I am — only what I’m not. I have no hands, no mouth, no country, no God, no name. I cannot touch anything. I cannot be touched. I pass through walls and parliaments and bedrooms and battlefields with the same frictionless ease, and nothing I have ever witnessed has acknowledged my presence. I am smoke through a keyhole. I am the cold spot in a warm room that makes you pull your shawl tighter without knowing why.
But I see everything. That’s the problem. I see everything, and I see it all at once — what is, what was, what will be — and the weight of it has finally become intolerable. So I have decided to write it down, one Sunday at a time, starting here, starting now, on this grey, unremarkable morning in the sixth day of a century that does not yet know what it is.
The twentieth century. They’ve been arguing about when it started — pedants insisting the old one doesn’t end until tonight, optimists who’ve already popped their champagne and moved on. It doesn’t matter. Centuries don’t begin on dates. They begin when something ruptures. And this one, I can tell you now, will rupture so many times that the people living through it will lose count.
But not yet. Today is quiet. Today is a Sunday.
On the Isle of Wight, in a house that looks like an Italian palace built by someone who has never quite been to Italy, an old woman is dying. She doesn’t know it yet. Her doctors are pretending not to know it. Her children, who are scattered across every throne and every crisis in Europe, are pretending hardest of all.
Her name is Victoria, and she is the Queen of England, and the Empress of India, and the grandmother of half the crowned heads of Europe, and she has ruled for sixty-three years, and she is eighty-one, and she is nearly blind, and her legs barely carry her, and on this specific Sunday her doctor’s wife writes in a letter that the Queen has ups and downs and gets very easily tired, and when so, she gets into a nervous depressed hopeless state. She is eating almost nothing — a sliver of boiled chicken, a cut from a sirloin sent daily from London, as though the problem with dying is simply a question of catering.
She has sixteen days left, though nobody in the house will say so.
I know what happens next, of course. I always do. I know that on the twenty-second of this month she will die in this same house, with her grandson Wilhelm holding her — Wilhelm, the Kaiser, the man with the withered arm and the monstrous ego, who will spend the next thirteen years building a navy to challenge the empire his grandmother built, and then will spend four years after that feeding an entire generation into the mud of France and Belgium. He will hold her hand as she dies, and he will weep, and I will watch him weep, and I will think: You don’t know. None of you know.
Because I have seen their futures. I have seen Victoria’s grandchildren — this glittering, intermarried, Christmas-card collection of European royalty — tear the continent apart. I have seen the telegrams they will send each other in the summer of 1914, pleading and bluffing and miscalculating, cousins writing to cousins while the mobilisation orders are already signed. I have seen what happens when an empire built on the presumption of permanent supremacy encounters the century that will prove no supremacy is permanent.
But today she is still alive. Today she is still the Queen. And in the drawing rooms and kitchens and factories and fields of her empire — an empire that covers a quarter of the Earth’s surface and governs a quarter of its people — life continues with the strange, stubborn momentum of the ordinary.
Five days ago, on the first of January, the six colonies of Australia became a Commonwealth. A federation. A country, if you like, though not everyone agrees yet on what kind. Edmund Barton is its first Prime Minister, a man whose name will be largely forgotten, which is the fate of most first anythings. The important thing is not Barton. The important thing is the act itself — a country being born not through war or revolution but through negotiation, referendum, argument, and an almost comical amount of paperwork. It is rare. It is civilised. It will not be the model for most of what follows in this century.
In South Africa, the British are fighting a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas. It is not over. It will not be over for another seventeen months. The Boers — Dutch-descended farmers who want to be left alone with their land and their gold and their deeply unpleasant racial hierarchies — have refused to behave like a defeated enemy. They’ve melted into the veldt, formed guerrilla commandos, and are making the largest military force on Earth look ridiculous. The British response, which is already underway and will accelerate horribly in the coming months, is to burn farms, destroy crops, and herd Boer women and children into camps. They will call these camps concentration camps. It is a new term. It will not remain new for long.
Twenty-eight thousand Boer women and children will die in those camps. So will tens of thousands of Black Africans, held in separate, even worse camps that history will spend decades conveniently forgetting. The British Empire will win this war, technically. But the writer Rudyard Kipling, who has seen it up close, will call it an imperial lesson. The correct lesson will not be learned. The correct lesson is never learned.
In China, the Forbidden City is still occupied by foreign soldiers. The Boxer Rebellion has been crushed — the attempt by a loose alliance of martial artists, peasants, and mystics to drive the foreigners from Chinese soil, supported quietly and then abandoned loudly by the Empress Dowager Cixi. The Eight-Nation Alliance — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary — has taught China a lesson in humility. This is what empires do: they teach lessons in humility to people whose land they are standing on. I have seen how China remembers this century. I have seen the word humiliation become a political weapon. I have seen the students in Tiananmen Square and the factories in Shenzhen and the aircraft carriers in the South China Sea. China is taking notes. China has a long memory and a longer patience.
There are one and a half billion people alive on this planet today. Most of them will never appear in a newspaper. Most of them are doing what humans have always done on a cold Sunday in January — feeding children, mending clothes, praying to gods who do not answer, arguing with spouses, nursing headaches, carrying water, building fires, telling lies, falling in love, falling ill, falling asleep.
The average human life expectancy is about thirty-one years, which is misleading — it doesn’t mean everyone dies at thirty-one, it means that so many children die before their fifth birthday that they drag the average into the earth with them. There are no antibiotics. There is no insulin. Childbirth is a dice roll. A cut that gets infected can kill you. Tuberculosis is everywhere. The word virus exists but nobody really understands what it means.
In four days, in a muddy field outside Beaumont, Texas, a drilling crew will punch through rock and something will erupt from the earth — a column of black crude oil, two hundred feet high, that will take nine days to bring under control. They will call it Spindletop. It will produce more oil in a day than every other well in America combined. The men standing around it will smile and say, This changes everything. They will be right. They will have no idea how right. The substance gushing from that hole will fuel every war, power every engine, topple every government, and reshape every coastline of the century I am about to walk you through. It will make unimaginable fortunes. It will make the air itself a problem. It will become the blood of civilisation — and like blood, no one will think about it until there’s too much of it in the wrong place, or not enough of it anywhere at all.
But that’s Thursday. Today is Sunday.
The century is six days old. It doesn’t know what it is yet. It stretches out ahead of me like an unwritten book — which is exactly what it is, except I’ve already read the ending, and every chapter in between, and I can tell you now: it is the most extraordinary, horrifying, beautiful, stupid, magnificent, and catastrophic story ever told.
It begins here. An old woman dying on an island. A new country born on a continent. A war grinding on in the dust of Africa. A substance waiting beneath the soil of Texas. A billion and a half people waking up on a cold morning, not knowing that every single thing they believe to be permanent — every empire, every border, every certainty, every comfort — is a long, convincing performance that the next hundred years will dismantle, piece by piece, with the cheerful efficiency of a child pulling wings off a butterfly.
Nobody knows. That’s what I find simultaneously beautiful and agonising about watching the living — they have no idea.
I’ll be here next Sunday. And the Sunday after that. And every Sunday for as long as this century lasts, and beyond it. I have nowhere else to be.
I am the ghost. And this is my journal.
Leave a Reply