Notes to Self: History Feeds into Reality Feeds into Fiction

Attending to the news cycle could drive us all round the bend, because we can't stand to look and, if we have a shred of decency left in us, we can't look away.

Headline from The Guardian: Across America, police are responding to peaceful protests with violence

Excerpt from Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States:

To write something down doesn't make it true. But the history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail....To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; the seas with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty

History is in the making, all around us. Add a notebook. A pen.

A character emerges.

Manipulate time. Now? The past? The future? Which of those could we possibly have imagined as we are compelled to imagine and reimagine them daily now?

I don't think I've ever lived in a now that has exerted a more powerful pull on my conscience. This is a test. It has to be. Tomorrow may well depend on how we live this today of ours. How young people tomorrow will perceive and employ the history of truth may well depend on how we write about it.