The Aftermath.

For those of my generation, the phrase has always carried a certain duality of view that has been difficult to reconcile. Like so many, I was born into a world that had already undergone a great calamity. From my perspective, there has never been a separation between what once was and what now is. The world is what it is, so to have such a bright line between before and after was often hard to fully grasp

As I grew older, I learned that this is not an unusual phenomenon. The baby boomers found it difficult to comprehend the experiences of their parents and grandparents over two world wars, while an american born after the attack on the twin towers could seldom wrap their head around a world where their country was not at war.

Children of my generation cannot begin to fathom a world where a person could simply leave their PoL on a whim, where the greatest danger on the road was a flat tire or an icy surface rather than an M-Beast. The idea of an internet with the sum total of human knowledge and culture always at our fingertips, of globe spanning supply chains and just in time delivery; it hardly seems possible. Yet our current reality would no doubt look equally fanciful to those who came before.

I feel this disconnect was expressed best by a crèche mate from my teenage years:

"I can barely relate to the Cascades, let alone anything before them. It's in our textbooks, but that's all. Battles that were won, battles that were lost. It is in videos and recreations. It's just a story in the past, barely different from fiction. It's so disconnected, so abstract, even if I wanted to get emotionally invested it feels almost impossible."

She may have been a bit frustrated with my constant rambling on the subject, but as usual her brusque analysis was spot on. Most everyone knows the broad strokes, the hows and the whys as much as we understand them at all. But so little of that human element has passed down to us, if only because the scope of the thing was so vast that no one knew where to start. One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.

What does that make over seven billion?

Bright eyed youth that I was, I begged, borrowed and yes, in some cases, stole what I needed in order to begin and continue this record. To try and find a way to put a human face, a human presence and emotion behind the statistics and the facts. We may have been born into the aftermath, but the stories of those who came before us are cruicial to understanding not only how and why we got here, but what it felt like to be part of the transition.

I have been asked several times when, or if I will ever consider this work truly complete. The answer is that I do not know, but that this current fifth revision is unlikely to be the last. At just over fifty years since Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the number of prospective interviewees is ever dwindling, even with rejuvenate treatments becoming more commonplace. To me, this makes the work all more vital. We have lost so much of knowledge, it feels downright criminal to let old age and infirmity take even more. Perhaps when the last of them are gone, I'll take a breather, until then there are so many more stories to hear.