There are many worlds with many possibilities and history rhymes with the present. I know this because I read it. Repeatedly. Through depression and traumas and financial insecurities, I turned page after page and learned the Wicked Witch is really Elphaba, radical liberationist and scapegoat of the autocratic regime of Oz.

While adjusting to life with a traumatic brain injury, books and stories, often in audio form, helped me create images in my mind again. I learned from the characters in an obscure Stephen King novel, Duma Key, that new doors open when others have been slammed shut.

In 2014 I read Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy. History became now. Recognizable names and famous speeches and events of WWI and then WWII interwoven into stories of fictitious families given so much dimension as to seem real. I wondered what it was like to be there. Going through life. With your desires and fears and plans. When a regime changes and sweeps you into a tide of coming atrocities previously unimaginable.

I wondered what it would be like to live inside a Ken Follett book in 2014, and by 2016 I felt like I knew the answer. But not the last chapter. So I read Hannah Arendt but the truth had already become stranger than fiction so non-fiction was no longer even up for consideration. Maybe Sinclair Lewis had the answer. Or Philip Roth, whose Plot Against America told me clearly what to expect.

But who would listen?

In 2016 I saw Randall Flagg gather up the Harold Lauders of the nation and claim victory. And in 2020, the Plague arrived. Camus taught me years before how a Plague can change people and creep into their minds. The foreknowledge did little to offset this effect. A good story, nonetheless.

Each story a search for answers. A fanciful escape for the faithful, a warning of what could be to the slightly high-strung realist. A lost opportunity for those who lack imagination, who won’t see themselves in the pages, who close the book and say “I never saw January 6th coming.”

There are many worlds with many possibilities and history rhymes with the present. I know this because I read it. Repeatedly. Through depression and traumas and financial insecurities, I turned page after page and learned the Wicked Witch is really Elphaba, radical liberationist and scapegoat of the autocratic regime of Oz.

While adjusting to life with a traumatic brain injury, books and stories, often in audio form, helped me create images in my mind again. I learned from the characters in an obscure Stephen King novel, Duma Key, that new doors open when others have been slammed shut.

In 2014 I read Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy. History became now. Recognizable names and famous speeches and events of WWI and then WWII interwoven into stories of fictitious families given so much dimension as to seem real. I wondered what it was like to be there. Going through life. With your desires and fears and plans. When a regime changes and sweeps you into a tide of coming atrocities previously unimaginable.

I wondered what it would be like to live inside a Ken Follett book in 2014, and by 2016 I felt like I knew the answer. But not the last chapter. So I read Hannah Arendt but the truth had already become stranger than fiction so non-fiction was no longer even up for consideration. Maybe Sinclair Lewis had the answer. Or Philip Roth, whose Plot Against America told me clearly what to expect.

But who would listen?

In 2016 I saw Randall Flagg gather up the Harold Lauders of the nation and claim victory. And in 2020, the Plague arrived. Camus taught me years before how a Plague can change people and creep into their minds. The foreknowledge did little to offset this effect. A good story, nonetheless.

Each story a search for answers. A fanciful escape for the faithful, a warning of what could be to the slightly high-strung realist. A lost opportunity for those who lack imagination, who won’t see themselves in the pages, who close the book and say “I never saw January 6th coming.”