AFTER THE TROJAN WAR

Who had the imagination to imagine the Trojan War before it happened? What martial precedent was there for a war like that? Whoever thought of the Black Death before it struck? Was there anything in literature or painting to prepare the unsuspecting mediaeval mind for that?

Just how great had wars been before the Great War to end all wars? What writing predicted its scale? Had Tolstoy thought of that? And who on earth could ever have conceived of anything resembling the Holocaust? No drugs, nor even Shakespeare’s mind. No visionary in history had dreamt of that.

And we, a generation of people who imagine everything, and like the certainty of our predictions, must ask ourselves the terrifying question: What unimagined horror waits for us?

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