Decisive

We understand the idea of the decisive event: one might imagine a raindrop falling along the continental divide; if it comes down here it flows to the Atlantic; a centimeter further west and it flows into the Pacific. A difference of a few millimeters becomes, with time, a difference of several thousand miles - if in fact those original points are separated by a decisive line.

The analogy breaks when I try to apply it to human history. The Atlantic and the Pacific exist and shall continue to exist whichever way the raindrop runs. Human moments fall like raindrops on the watershed's divide, and flow into their course as human movement will. But the other side of the mountain, the other drainage, its streams and rivers and its ocean - this is history never born and which can never exist. The other side of the mountain has vanished forever.

An historical example might serve: Syracuse, 414 B.C. The written characters now facing you on this page are Roman derivitives rather than Greek because of feeble Athenian policy and strategy at the seige of Syracuse. Imagine the fonts we might have with a greek alphabet - and all the other changes we might have inherited had the classical world been dominated and molded by Athenian culture rather than Rome's. Did we gain more than we lost?

Does it matter who sits in the governor's chair? Are not he real and important parts of life above that plane? Do not mothers still nurse their babes and fathers teach their sons and honor that which is honorable? Or may human moments somehow be channeled into that watershed where such things have vanished forever?

What would the other side of the mountain have been like?