The Endgame

Newsletter #23 - Doors that swing shut

This newsletter looks at issues and events from the endgame point of view. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Options are limited and diminishing.

Port Medway, Nova Scotia, May 7, 2023

Doors that swing shut

When you’re young, or youngish, and cocky, brimming over with good health, happy, full of something, let’s say beans, or the joys of spring, you sometimes, perhaps often, think, nothing is impossible. The matter under contemplation may be very unlikely, there’s hardly a chance in hell of it happening if you’re being realistic, but it’s not impossible. It’s a wonderful thought.

Maybe the stars will come into alignment in an extraordinary way and a young Charlotte Rampling will telephone and ask you to join her for dinner in Paris. How on earth would that happen? It’s not going to happen. But, when you’re young, it doesn’t seem impossible.

Maybe the phone will ring and Prime Minister Lester Pearson will be on the line offering you the job of Canadian ambassador to France. Not likely, to say the very least. Lester Pearson doesn’t know you exist (why would he?) and anyway you’re completely unqualified for the position (in the world of diplomacy that doesn’t necessarily rule you out). But it might happen. It’s not impossible.

Maybe your first novel, published when you’re only twenty-nine, will become an international sensation. Step aside Frederick Forsyth (The Odessa File), Jacqueline Susann (Once is Not Enough), and Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull), eminent best-selling authors of 1973. This particular possibility is slim. It doesn’t depend on a preposterous phone call from out of the blue. You’ve got to write the book, and that’s a lot of work, and you’re young and the cafes beckon. Also, there’s the matter of talent. But it could happen. (I note in passing that literary fame is ephemeral. Look, for example, at the list of best-selling authors in the United States in 1923. Have you ever heard of Gertrude Atherton or Arthur Train?)

Possibilities like these, fuelling our fevered youth, are, of course, not real possibilities but juvenile fantasies, glamorous dreams doomed to be dashed. They have no place in the hard scrabble business of real living. But when you are young the world can seem full of promise and opportunity, albeit much of it prosaic.

You hope for and expect career advancement. You marry your high school sweetheart and intend to live happily ever after. You plan for two kids: one will be a doctor, the other, a high school mathematics teacher. You dream of buying a house in a leafy suburb with a white picket fence and a back yard big enough for the kids to play with the dog (a cockadoodle). You go to the gym, drink moderately, eat responsibly (vegan), and expect to stay healthy. These things seem possible, possibly even likely. They seem like reasonable and achievable aspirations.

It is depressing but undeniable that the doors swing shut as time goes by. Possibilities erode and dreams disappear. You are left, not with hope, but with history. Disappointment is history’s handmaiden.

What is the consolation? What remains?

I remember one day, almost sixty years ago, when I was a young university student in England. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. I was walking down Oxford High Street, one of the most beautiful streets in the world. I felt very happy. I thought to myself, nothing is impossible. It was a wonderful thought.

P.S. My new book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics.