I've been thinking about history and History.

history with a small h is the brownian motion of capital and ideas and people. It's your grandpa's story about how his dad helped manage a vaudeville theater. It's the book you picked off the shelf in the used book store, and you read it, and it changed who you are. It's the small series of events that led to you getting your job. It's the story of how you met your wife.

Then there's History, the Great and Grand History, the Events that Will Be Recorded. The ones that will end up in the big shabby textbook, given to you at the start of the semester with the names of the students who had it before you inscribed on the inside cover, and their doodles and marks and scrawls throughout, until the book is too old, its recent history section too far in the past, and the thing is sent out to pulp.

Most of us live our lives in history, but occasionally the Events of History interrupt us. There are three such Events that have changed my own history.

The first is the Cold War. The Eighties Version. The Reagan Version. The Day After Version. The one where synthpop stars sang bad songs about how they'd very much like for the world to be not destroyed, please and thank you. The one where Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov saved us all from annihilation, and none of us knew it.

I started working for SANE, because it seemed the only sane thing to do. I was fourteen. I thought I could do something about politics.

The second is the L.A. riots in 1992. I was in the last days of my senior year of college. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. My political science studies, my work for various members of Congress, had all soured me on the political idealism of my earlier youth. Perhaps I should go into publishing, where I had some experience, and making books is a good thing, right?

"Have you heard? Los Angeles is burning." Sometimes History's herald is a fellow student whose name you will never remember, later. And over the next few days, watching a city tear into itself, I resolved that whatever small thing I could do, I would do it. And, ever since, I have been.

The third is 9/11.

I'm still figuring out that Event.

I started thinking about History's interruptions after reading an article in the New Yorker about how close we came to foiling the 9/11 attacks. (The article isn't online but you can read an interview with the author Lawrence Wright here.) And how infighting between agencies kept us from doing so. I've been reading intelligence history from WWII, so trust me, this is nothing new. But I was gripped by a profound sense that my small thing wasn't worth a damn. What can one person ever do? What damn difference does it make?

I am gripped by this sense, because it seems that if there's anyone who could have stopped the attacks it was Paul O'Neill and Ali Soufa of the FBI. If you were to describe them -- the brash FBI commander who didn't play by the rules, and the young Muslim FBI agent who argued theology in Arabic with the terrorists he was interrogating -- you'd say that they were too perfect, made-for-TV. The fact that O'Neill, having left the FBI for a job as head of security for the World Trade Center, died on 9/11 further adds to the strangeness of this history, a history that seems like fiction.

I am gripped by this fear that my own small thing I'm doing to repair the world is fruitless. Because it easy to believe that we can change our history. It is hard to think that we can change our History.

One of the marvels of history is how haphazard it seems; a series of accidents lead up to where we are. I could have picked a different college and never met my wife. I could have picked a different book off the shelf. I could have taken a different train.

But History carries with it the myth of its own Inevitability. Events happen, and afterward we explain the Forces that led up to them: this ideology, that economic trend, this political movement, that technology. Even O'Neill and Soufa can't stand up to History. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm reading the article.

Later that day, they announce the arrest of a group that was thinking of bombing the Holland Tunnel. My family and I live on an island.

Today 172 people died in a series of terrorist bombings on a train in India. Seven explosions.

My first thought is to all of our Indian and South Asian friends -- both those we know by face and those we've met through this blog -- I hope and pray that your families are all right. Hope and prayer seem like thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. In a world on fire.

Whom were you trying to target? The working class men who struggle for an inch of space in local trains? The working women who knit and cut vegetables in trains on their way home? Young, dreamy students discussing exams and love? The babies accompanying their mothers, smiling back at the women around them? Darkness is fast falling. Its raining like it will not stop. Will the rains wash away the blood?

I start reading what the bloggers are writing, the firsthand accounts and the anguish and the recriminations, and then I just can't anymore.

So tonight I sit down and think about History. I put on Joni Mitchell's Blue, because nothing else will do right now.

There's some other music, actually, that I'm thinking of, a composition by Steve Reich, called Different Trains. Reich weaves taped interviews about World War II into his music. "During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains."

172 people could have travelled on a very different train. I could have taken a very different train. We get on trains every day, thinking they will take us where we always go. But then History arrives instead.

There is something terrifying in the idea of a History we cannot change. It is why I reject the myth of the inevitability of History. And yet there is a demon, a devil of History, who whispers in our ears that the myth is true, that we are ceaselesly borne forwards and cannot change what happens to us. We are on the train and there is no stopping it.

Some researchers in South America have recently found that a people called the Aymara point in front of them when talking about the past, and behind them when talking about the future. This reminded more than one commenter of Walter Benjamin's angel of history:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

It seems to me that there is something quite natural about the Aymara's perception of the past before them and the future behind them. We can see the past, as we can see what is before us. The future is as invisible as the back of your head. Where your eyes don't go.

The angel of history is terrifying because as he looks backwards into the past, he can do nothing. The devil of history, or more properly, of History, is more terrifying still because he looks forwards into the future we cannot see:

The devil of History looks forward. His back is always toward us and we cannot see his face. He sees the glaciers melting, hears knives being sharpened in the dark. Species turn into fossils, empires will fall. Newer and clever machines are built. Humanity remains stubborn and beautiful and cruel. All this, he says, is in your future.

You, who cannot see the future, clutch at the devil whose back is always to you. It's not set in stone! you cry. You cannot know.

He laughs as events hurtle past you both. Look at the past, he says. Look at its follies and murders and grand disasters. Do you really think the future can be better?

But we can change it! You are angry. It's not too late. Someone is always the first to suddenly stand up from their soft chair. We can all do something.

You think you can stand against History? The devil mocks you. History will take no more notice of you than a tank takes notice of a pebble caught up in its treads as it grinds its way toward a distant battle. Tend to your clever machines. Write words that will not last. Only my words will last. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

You don't believe the devil. The devil is there to trick you, to make you give up. Perhaps his unseen eyes are blind. But you have no better answers to his prophecies and proclamations and predictions.

There is a great wind coming from the future. The devil's back is to you. So you turn your back on him. Hope and prayer are thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. A sure knot, and the string is reeled. It goes from the kite to your hand, to the vessels that lead from your hand to your heart.

There is a great wind coming from the future. It bears your kite aloft. This is your banner. Your call to arms. Perhaps others will see it; perhaps not. Perhaps you can change something, prove the devil wrong; perhaps not. Perhaps nothing will come of your attempt and the devil's History will arrive. Then again, perhaps not.

There is a great wind coming from the future. Here you stand, with a kite of paper in a world on fire. You can do no other. May God help us all.

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