SINCERELY, FUTURE BEING
I check a lot of books out of my two local libraries. The Walla Walla library downtown is a great place for satisfying my bedtime reading habits (mostly guilty pleasures I’m guilty enough about not to detail). The much larger Whitman College library still offers me the same privileges I had ahead of retirement: Whitman granted me emeritus status, and with it came full use of the marvelous four-story word warehouse known as Penrose. The Eells Northwest Collection downstairs is quite stunning; I’m down there a lot.
When I check books back in, I have a habit of flashing through the pages of each volume to make sure I haven’t left a stray bookmark or some random slip of notepaper inside, say a shopping list. Yesterday when I took a stack back to Whitman, a short, handwritten letter fell out of one book. I had not placed the thing inside. It was penned on a pair of tightly folded slips of lined stationery, the kind that fits into a standard postcard-sized envelope. The writing was fully legible – black ink, block letters, not cursive. Here is how it read:
Dear You,
I am not mad at you, one individual, for failing to create a more habitable world for us. I am mad at how you collectively failed us. We live in a state of uncertainty, violence, and instability. Your leaders saw the warning signs years in advance and decided to keep living as you were, creating meaningless technologies and consuming resources endlessly.
Hold closely to your family and loved ones. They’re all you have. This is an existential crisis on a massive scale. We will not have a human race sooner or later, and my generation needs to find ways to continually stay alive. I can’t tell you what the proper way to do this would have been. It wasn’t enough, whatever you did, and there’s no further solutions we can use. Do anything and everything you can, and take some accountability for us.
Sincerely,
Future being
Before I read those words – the full text of the letter – I immediately thought it was a missive intended to be sent to someone, a short note penned quickly by the person who had checked out this book ahead of me, and then mistakenly sealed inside. I felt perhaps I should just leave it there and not pry into the writer’s private thoughts – there is something so intimate about a short note written by hand – but then I unfolded it and read the salutation. “Dear You.” I suddenly flashed on the idea that this was a letter penned to oneself. “Dear You” could just as easily have read, “Dear Me.” But then the first two sentences made the intention plain. It struck me that leaving this note in a book, tucked silently in the middle pages, was a deliberate act, a message-in-a-bottle kind of act. Someone, someday would check this book out (it was an obscure volume of Pacific Northwest history) and find himself, or herself, addressed directly as “You.” I read the full letter then and felt it hit.
The sadness of it arrested me. The despair. What also arrested me was how the message found its mark. Me. I am of the generation to whom this letter is addressed. I am a perfect “You” in this case. A retired professor of environmental studies, environmental literature; a one-time, long-time political activist who did indeed try to help mend a deeply wounded world – and failed, just as the letter suggests.
Yes, I can see the juvenile thinking expressed in this note. In fact, I could feel the color rise in my face as I read, for I had once been the very sort of young person who had written it. The naivete expressed in these two short paragraphs was the very sort of naivete I possessed as an undergraduate. But my form of it was idealism – of the kind that resonated across the country, the world, in the early 1970s, the “Environmental Decade.” The naivete I held in my hands there in the library had a different source. It was a naivete of despair, not idealism. It took for granted the fact that the world had already been shattered and could not be repaired. Yes, the writing rings with blame, and yes, the blame seems shallow, but I had dozens of bright students over the years – environmental studies students, most of them activists-in-utero – who could have written this letter. I could not talk them away from their despair. I did not try. But I did try to help them learn how to re-direct it.
A good acting coach – my wife, a former actor, informs me – tells her charges to use everything they have, every time. Even despair, in its bleakest of robes, is something to be used as we – any of us – attempts to act on the world. I understand the letter not to be a suicide note because it ends with “Future” as the signature. The “being” suggests a will to continue. The wounded stagger but do not necessarily fall. I wish I could somehow let this future being of a writer know that his or her letter dropped into the creases of a seldom-used book touched me. I’m willing to listen to despair, maybe have a glass of wine with it poured from its own sea-going bottle, before the lights go out. My generation does deserve blame. But we are also an object lesson, also to be used. As our idealism faded, we became disillusioned, and then cynical, and finally disgusting. We wantonly capitulated to the very things we professed to despise. Perhaps the future being who penned this dark letter could learn from us after all.