Hope and the Ugly Places

I had two tabs open in my browser the other day. One was a Chicago Tribune article ennumerating overnight shootings, several of which had taken place in Englewood. The other was a Wikipedia page on H. H. Holmes, the Devil in the White City himself, who built a murder castle in Englewood where he systematically killed and disposed of his victims. I have no solid explanation for how both tabs came to be open at 2 PM on a workday. Chalk it up to my daily Tribune perusal coupled with the impending arrival of Halloween. At any rate, a stray thought flitted across my mind, soon chased away by my dominant, rational side: if anywhere on this planet is haunted, Englewood is surely haunted, and maybe the awful things one man did over a decade ago are somehow echoing across time. Stop being ridiculous, I told myself. You know what's haunting Englewood: poverty, racism, and violence.

Still, I couldn't quite shake H. H. Holmes and his horrific crimes, and as I drove home a couple days later I came up with a tentative explanation as to why. You would assume that the world's ugliness would come as less of a shock to an adult. You'd think that the unintentional information-gathering that is anyone's life would provide you with a strong enough foundation for contextualization. Maybe there are some people for whom this is true, but I'm not one of them. I think the more people I meet--complex, not 100% sympathetic people who have had more than their fair share of misfortunes--the more shocked I become that anyone, anyone, would do what Holmes did. I know a lot of imperfect people. I may even know dangerous people. I don't know anyone who would do what he did.

Intellectually, I know that anyone is capable of anything. I'm constantly being sold this message by books, movies, the news, historians, logic. Nonetheless, knowing something is very different from believing it, and the more I come to know myself, the more I come to realize that I am only shockable when one of my beliefs has been overturned or called into question. I'm not a blind optimist--there is evil in the world--but I find it hard to conceive of a world without hope, and everything about H. H. Holmes is hopeless. There are no easy fixes for Englewood, either, but I can feel a little better about a story that is still playing out.

Around the time I was sucked into the H. H. Holmes Wikipedia vortex, I started reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Although it contains a handy helping of tragedy and more than its share of villains, Cloud Atlas is a humanist novel with an optimistic ending. It carries us from the Industrial Revolution (albeit without much industry) to self-inflicted ruin and back again via six loosely connected narratives occurring in different times and places but eerily echoing each other. As the New York Times put it:

[The novel's central narrative is] a postapocalyptic future on an Earth where stories of our storied civilizations past are all that remain of works and days, and then only as fragments, like those we’ve been reading. This is where the human race and its predatory nature will lead us, the novella would seem to suggest, while at the same time the novel is arguing otherwise. For that postapocalyptic fate is not the end of “Cloud Atlas,” merely its middle. The second half of the novel is the mirror image of the first, offering, in reverse order, conclusions to each of the novellas that turn out not to be unfinished but interrupted. By the time we reach the novel’s final page, we have traveled back to the journey that began in 1850, that of a man following footsteps into the unknown, a future that might lead to our end but that, just as possibly, the novel’s fluid form suggests, could lead anywhere, even to that most unlikely destination: salvation from ourselves.

 The forces at work in the novel are all-powerful and all-consuming. It seems ludicrous the one man could influence an all but inevitable trajectory. Life, as (only) one of the novels six narrators concludes, could be hopeless after all. Or...

Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response: "[...] He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

You haven't heard the last of Cloud Atlas here. For one thing, I've been suffering from book-lag, unable to get it out of my head since finishing it three days ago. For another, I can already tell that this is going to be one of those books that I reflect on throughout my life. Like Dido Twite in Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles, or the characters in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or The Wire, or Tales of the City, or The History Boys, I feel that Cloud Atlas and its characters will be touchstones, and that through examining those fictional lives I will better understand my own.

At the very least, it's something to think about on a rainy day. And if a droplet is one day motivated by this book to take on a thing like Englewood, so much the better.