Hello there. I appear to have caught your eye. Forgive me, but I see you’re blushing. That’s not a surprise. In my position, believe me, I’m used to it.
Confused? Seen me before? Perhaps you have, hanging around the fringes of something wonderful. I get things done. Stuff happens because of me.
Some call me inspiration. Some call me love. Others have made me a woman, like luck. Am I? It’s in the eye of the beholder. I’m not a muse. I am a whole air wing of muses.
I am the voice of ambition whispering into ever-eager ears. Your poets saw me as much as their paramours when they wrote of love. Inventors have me to thank. You ought to thank me.
I drove your conquerors to madness and to achievement. What do some call me? The world-spirit. The time-ghost?
Personally, I prefer World Spirit. It is what I wish I were called. If I had my time again — ah, but what is time? Some Germans came up with a name for me, and I believe it has stuck.
Did I have a hand in their naming? you ask.
I wouldn’t wish to comment. But here’s what I have done.
That composition — art of pure inspiration — which shapes your mind and shakes your soul? Not natural talent, not god-given skill. Me, all me.
Who am I? you say.
I’m the zeitgeist. I’m the spirit of the age. That’s what your Hazlitt called me, in English. Did I give him the phrase? I might have suggested it. A word in the right ear. That’s all it takes. Just one word.
Why was it so easy to write fine blank verse in the time of Good Queen Bess in your country of England? I must take a hand. Your Greene, your Jonson, your Marlowe — take a bow, all of them, actors in my parade. They heard the call when it was issued.
Athens before the reign of Macedon’s Philip — that was perhaps my happiest time. Their playwrights, they could not be bettered. You believe the works that have survived are of quality. Let me tell you, your worst fears are right. All the best things really are are lost. If you thought Aeschylus tragic, if you thought Aristophanes funny — believe me, they were. They were. And the best of them lies entombed in buried clay jars, yet to be unearthed. And in my capacious memory, of course. Shall I tell you some of what it contains?
But first, a little reminiscence. Vienna between the wars — I built such a culture there. I made even the pastry chefs perform. And London, London at its finest! You should have heard them talk — Samuel Johnson and Boswell and Reynolds in one era — Newton and Boyle and Hooke and Wren and John Aubrey (a great friend of mine, a rare good man) in another. They were scintillating. It’s a pity you missed them. Really, it is.
Leonardo and all his neuroses. He would ask me, Am I wasting my talent, dear friend?
I do not believe so, Maestro (for that is what I called him).
Why a revolution in New England in the late eighteenth century? Why did Cromwell hear my call? I know, I believe I do, but I cannot say in words you might understand.
I sent Bobby Fischer mad. Do not blame me for that. He had it always in him. I assure you. I barely eased his taking of the path.
So, who am I?
Well, I let you see that in my works.
Some of the thinkers, men of action, who needed me, depended on me, prayed for me. I can introduce you to them.
Alexander thought I was at his side always. I sometimes was. Many men hear the call when it is issued. Women, too, are not immune.
Oh, they think they can bend me to their will, some of them. Your Machiavelli had it wrong. He said that good luck — 'fortuna' — was a woman. A woman to be tamed; all chaos to be subdued by the order of the man of destiny. But I'm all man. I direct things on my terms. A word in an ear is not a feminine act when it gets results.
I’m destiny on horseback.
I don't know if there is a creator-being, a god. I exist and I am — at least in human terms — ancient, unextinguishable. But I had a beginning.
Some could see me. They could penetrate the veil I threw about myself which allowed me to move through the world unseen by most mortals. Over the years I adopted guises, the image of a vigorous man whose youth is seemingly about to end.
And yet, when a man such as I emerged, all counsel, all understanding, how did men react? How are you reacting now to such a story as this?
Socrates: men in your day think of him as an exemplar! He was led to his destruction by his vanity — vanity I compelled in him.
Caesar saw a little further than his age would accept because he heard my siren call. Standing by his side in the Senate, I saw him amass power at the expense of the wealthy, I saw him subvert the elites. And I laughed.
Caesar said he was the luckiest of all men, lucky because my friend. But who whispered in the ears of the men who saw to Caesar’s murder? I’ll never tell. I was with Caesar as he died — close enough to feel his ragged breaths on my cheek, but unable to impart new advice. After all, I, who had brought him safe through Gaul, a civil war, all those skirmishes with death, had also brought him to this bloody precipice. Augustus, he said he had inherited his adoptive father’s luck. But I deserted him in the end, did I not?
Your Shakespeare (I knew him well) got Cleopatra partially right. She saw me straight as few have; she let me use her talents. So great was she that I almost lost my own composure. Those unstill eyes, that agile voice, those pure white alabaster shoulders! I was unsettled. It would not do for a spirit to desire only the corporeal.
And yet nemesis comes even to those long prepared. Your poet Cavafy, listening to what I told him, said that of Antony, did he not?
Rome fell. You at least know of that? And the men thereafter lived in the ruins of amphitheatres and lived beneath towering aqueducts built by their betters, their fathers.
And the fathers of the church wrote their plaintive works across the sea from the place where the light of civilisation was in temporary repose. I sat at their feet. I watched their desks. Their words moved me — even me, a spirit. I knew, after all, what it was that they had lost.
Some insist that the Dark Ages were not really dark. They had learning and light aplenty, some latter-day scholars claim. But trust me. I was there. It was dark enough — as I intended.
Where was I during what you call your Dark Ages? I was abroad, travelling, finding myself. I had already been busy in what you call the Middle East. A whole host of holy men had heard my words. They cared what I might offer them. I made them think that they too could put the world on a new course. And some of them succeeded. They all listen to my protestations. They’re seduced by it. I don’t mean to be a flirt, you understand. I merely suggest some things that men like, and they listen to me; they listen to me, contrary to their own interests, sometimes. I put ideas in their heads.
The history of Europe, oh, such a mess. So much blood and fighting. I’d pick a man, imbue him with a surfeit of bravery or glory and I would see him dashed to pieces. But it was his fault. He would believe the things I said. Charles of Burgundy. He that your chroniclers call ‘the Bold’. He was a beautiful man. The painting by your painter van der Weyden catches him best, I believe. A hint of gathering fat around the jaw and the cheeks. That large low country nose. The heavy lips set in a hard line. Those intent, vivid eyes (were they green?) always straight on yet on the edge of boredom. He heard my calls, heard them all too well. What good did it do him? To lead a life of great luxuriousness, real magnificence, and to freeze to death half in a river on a frozen battlefield. Ah, fate. One cannot fight it.
They did not always submit so gamely. Dostoyevsky was assured that I was a devil come to torment him. He would shriek and scream that this visitation must quit his presence so that the love of the true God might be conducted through to his sensitive soul. Napoleon would lecture me for hours. But I beat him when the time came.
Hegel wrote rather a lot about me. A strange one, he. Goethe was more to my taste; though like all geniuses, especially ones that I did not create, whose brilliance predated my efforts, a little wearing a man to know well.
In the twentieth century, I saw humanity at its most decadent. its most repellent. Cockroach-like, infestation-like, you continued to multiply. Humanity and yeast were all of a kind to me in those days.
Admit it, you tell me. Fine! I will. My taste for humanity had waned. Perhaps I no longer wanted your species to persist. I sent four devils to end your race. You know their names, of course. I spoke to bank robbers and psychopathic corporals, failed revolutionaries and aspirant poets. They almost did what I desired and humanity the ultimate favour. But even they could not do it.
And thus your species survived.
In the years since, your leaders have had the chance to finish what I begun: the tools to end the species are here, right to hand. But I ought to have learnt by now that my will in this way alone shall not yet be done. The universe has a sense of irony!
How was I to guess that failures of technology, of planning, and of nerve would allow humanity to stumble on to new heights of nihilism and decadence?
That is your modern age. I meant to spare you all of it, believe me. But the tools I handed you for your own destruction have instead built a new world. I bid you use them well, whatever your ends may be. I mean it sincerely. A spirit such as I never lies.
One more thing. Listen to the call, for you will be hearing from me again. Count upon it. History is not so long, and mankind so deaf, that I will never again appear. I’m speaking to you, am I not?
Know that I will return. Someone will hear my voice in their ear. Sooner than you think, sooner than you know.
First published here.