But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” is becoming increasingly difficult.

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

We can’t truly conceive the conditions of a multidimensional reality, even though we’re (probably) already living inside one. We have a limited understanding of consciousness. We have a limited understanding of time, and of the perception of time, and of the possibility that all time is happening at once.

It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we live in a time where the numbers of creators of literature has just exploded—and that plenitude is the field, and the context for the tiny, tiny number of things that get celebrated in the present, let alone recalled ten or twenty years later, let alone by the 22nd century. And it is all absolutely without any mercy destined to evaporate into the memory hole—irretrievably.”

I certainly understand the mentality behind forwarding the possibility that nothing from this era will be remembered, simply due to volume. There are also those who contend we no longer need to “remember” anything at all, since the Internet has unlimited storage and ebooks never go out of print (and

But once you went to college—and especially if you went to an expensive school—you learned about the equally important works that were mostly hidden (and usually for nonliterary reasons). That was the secret history of literature.

But here’s where we taste the insecure blood from Klosterman’s Razor: The mere fact that I can imagine this scenario forces me to assume that it won’t happen.

Whatever you imagined is the potential identity of the Contemporary Kafka. And if your fabricated answer seems especially improbable, it just means you might actually be close.

In order to overcome such impossible odds and defeat the unrelenting ravages of time, the book has to offer more. It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so. It must do what Vonnegut requests—reflect reality. And this is done by writing about the things that matter today, even if they won’t necessarily matter tomorrow.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the twentieth century, and the only people who’d potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question. History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

To attack True Detective or Lost or Twin Peaks as “unrealistic” is a willful misinterpretation of the intent. We don’t need television to accurately depict literal life, because life can literally be found by stepping outside. Television’s only real-time responsibility is to entertain. But that changes as years start to elapse.

Ohio is a wonderful place to ponder the state of American democracy, because you’re constantly being reminded that America is where you are. Ohio is a scale model of the entire country, jammed into 43,000 square miles.