Fantastic journeys through history

a poll for readers of the Burning Archive

On the Burning Archive I offer you “fantastic journeys” through history so you can make sense of this puzzling world.

Today I have a puzzle about the Burning Archive that you can help me with.

Should I divide the Burning Archive into two publications, with one focussed on world history and one on Literature and the Nobel Prize?

In this post I am asking you to help me by responding to a poll.

Making Sense of a Puzzling World

The world is changing in dramatic, puzzling ways.

Some people think they know for sure what it all means. But none agree on just what it does all mean. 

But the certainty marches on. Population will collapse! The US dollar will fail! Empires will crumble! Justice will prevail! Wars will end, just as we planned them.

Where does this certainty come from? How can people be so sure when we are all surrounded by the fog of the future?

People trap themselves in certainty with rigid, unexamined narratives of history. They simplify the chaotic intricacy of history with grand narratives, monocausal arguments, and one big idea.

Unlike many commentators, I am not so sure. One day, I fear a disastrous world war will begin. The next day, I sense we will just stumble into some bearable mess. I sit in the ambiguity. I look around for seekers who ask better questions. Like, how did we get here? Where are we going? Who else has been here? I follow André Gide’s maxim:

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

Doubt is not popular. The cocksure pundits suppress their doubts, and are rewarded for their bold, confident manner on panel shows, think tanks, modern political theatre, or viral social media. But quiet doubts open the way to deeper perception.

Wise writers have long known that cocksure pundits get it wrong. They cover up their mistakes with bluster. “Contemporary is not what shouts the loudest, but what keeps the quietest,” wrote Marina Tsvetaeva in The Poet and Time in the 1920s. About the same time, Yeats wrote that the centre cannot hold and the worst are full of passionate intensity. The best ask questions of those certain convictions (“the end of history”, “we are the greatest power on earth”, “this is the new world order”) that have caused the mess we are in. It is we—the quiet meek of the earth—who inherit the problem, at the end of it all, of how to clean it up.

The Burning Archive is for the quiet voices. It is for the perceptive doubters. It is for the unsure seekers of wisdom from history and literature. I write it because the stories we use to make sense of the world don’t make sense anymore. The real world has gone off in a different direction. This is what Adam Tooze means by the ‘polycrisis’. It is not just everything going wrong all at once. It is the breakdown of certainty about our common history. The paradigm and the narrative are broken.

If you are reading this substack, I imagine, you sense this too. You want to learn from past wisdom, world literature and history to live well today. That is why I seek to make the Burning Archive a place for intelligent open conversation between many perspectives and cultures about how to make sense of this puzzling world.

The aspiration is caught in the words of an ancient Tamil poet, Thiruvalluvar:

“Wisdom is to live in tune with the mode of a changing world”

Fantastic Journeys Through History

Over the last few months, I have been developing my ideas about how this substack can help you find the wisdom to live in tune with a changing world.

I was inspired by a brilliant novel of historical fiction (and so much else besides), Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. The long subtitle of that book has inspired me to offer you enjoyment, reflection, and some understanding of a changing world through the five fantastic journeys.

The Books of Jacob, or: A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the major sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment.”

I have decided to feature this brilliant Nobel Laureate as one fantastic journey that you can take through the Burning Archive.

Where will these fantastic journeys take you? To places where you can discover your own insights into this changing world:

• A ‘choose-your-own adventure’ through my profiles of the Nobel Prize for Literature and its treasure chest of books and writers, the Nobel Archive.

• Monthly features of Nobel-Prize authors including readings and discussions

• A slow read of the Nobel-Prize winning border-crossing novels of Olga Tokarczuk, including The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, just released in English translation

• A deep dive into the rise and fall of global empires from 1400, using the widely respected masterpiece of world history

• Changing World Series—weekly posts pointing to insights from history into today’s “empires” and major powers (USA, Europe, China, India, and Russia, and extending over time to South-East Asia, Africa, and the Islamic World) with a focus on culture

• Monthly mini-audiobook readings and group discussions of big ideas in history.

A poll for readers of the Burning Archive

But I have a question for you.

Should I offer you all that content in one publication or two? Should I divide the Burning Archive into two?

For example, I could focus:

• one publication on how history helps to understand the changing world, and

• the second publication on the best of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Over the coming weeks I want to design my program, schedules, membership tiers and benefits in a way that works best for readers. Your advice on this critical decision for the Burning Archive will help me design that program around your preferences.

Please let me know me what works best for you so we can search together for the wisdom of living in tune with the mode of a changing world.