Of Past and Papacy

Scene 1
 
It is a little bit past eight in the morning. I am lying in bed, emerging from sleep. ROOMMATE is up and dressed and checking her phone.
 
ME: *shows signs of awakeness*
ROOMMATE: The Pope resigned!
ME: Wow.
ROOMMATE: It’s like the first time in 600 years that this has happened.
ME: That’s crazy.
ROOMMATE: *leaves room*
ME: *goes back to sleep*
 
Scene 2
 
It is now exactly 8:45. My alarm has just gone off, and I must begin my hectic day.
 
ME: I do not wish to leave my bed.
ME: I think I had really a weird dream.
ME: Yeah. Roommate told me that the Pope resigned.
ME: That never happens.
ME: My brain comes up with the weirdest #$%& sometimes.
 
Scene 3
 
It is lunchtime. After a busy morning, I am sitting down to a vaguely disappointing salad and checking my Facebook. As one does.
 
ME: Look, Roommate posted a link to a NYT article.
ME: The Pope resigned?!

-end-

 
So apparently the resignation of the Pope was not a fabrication of my subconscious mind, though it says something about my imagination that I would think it was. I have a minor interest in the papacy because of its longevity and its impact on, you know, the entire world. (The list of things in which I have a minor interest would probably come to several hundred entries including folk songs, monotremes, Russia, and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.) So this news is the sort that makes me very aware of existing in history.
 
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how all events are critical events and all eras are eras of change. I’m deeply suspicious of periods labeled with words like “stable” and “placid” and “Pax” because I can’t imagine an unchanging time or place. I once read some fiction-writing guidelines that advised a dynamic setting. Stories=change, and so this makes perfect sense. But what setting isn’t changing? It’s a mistake to think that humans anywhere at any time have achieved some sort of mystical equilibrium. I’m a person, I know many, and I know what we’re like. We are forces of change.

 

Forces of change.

 
But we are also wildly irrational. We’re frightened by the world of change we inhabit; we’re scared of our own hurtling dynamism. We’re too small to understand how we produce the incredible insanity that is the past. What I love about history is that it makes something immense (a story that is millennia long) out of something very tiny (the human lifetime). I can’t know what 600 years is like, but I can stand in awe of it. History accesses the human capacity for wonder.
 
What I hate about history is that you can’t work with it until it has inched its way into the part of the past beyond memory. You can’t get a really good look at something until it’s far away, but by then you’ve lost a vital connection to it. The consequences of Benedict XVI’s actions will be analyzed by my great-grandchildren after I’m dead (presuming that they come to love history and also acquire a minor interest in the papacy*).
 
Days like these make me feel like I’m living in crazy times. My rational mind was right to assume that the Pope doesn’t simply resign. It hasn’t happened since 1415. (Way to go, rational mind! You’re awesome.) But they also remind me that no one and nothing is safe from change. All times are crazy times, and history is something we make, not something that happens.
 
--Bridget
 
*If you happen to be reading this, great-grandchildren, I hope that you love history. It’s amazing. I’m a part of it, and so are you. And so is this blog, apparently, which worries me ever so slightly.