Once again, year's-end reminiscing has me dipping into the archives to see what I was thinking way back when. Here's a piece I wrote twenty years ago, and published in the November 1978 issue of the North Shore Press, a brief and ill-fated experiment in alternative journalism here on the island. Has anything much changed since then, internally or externally? Well -- as the French say, "Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose" (the more it changes, the more it's the same old same-old).

*

"I've been feeling very depressed lately," I told my friend Richard last time I saw him. (Richard is a philosopher who, disguised as a photography teacher, survives in Baltimore. He is also something of an authority on depression.)

"Really? Why?" he inquired from within his beard.

"I'm beginning to internalize the realization that I'm living in the heart of a decadent society," I explained.

"Your depression sounds like a perfectly normal and healthy response to that situation," Richard intoned.

Talking with Richard is always reassuring.

*

Snowed in during the Great Winter of '77-'78, I was on the horn one morning with my friend Michael. Michael is a raw nerve disguised as a poet. He lives in Manhattan, across the street from Stuyvesant, my old high school, which evokes traumatic memories each time I visit. (I once asked him how he could live there, and he replied, "I wouldn't live across the street from my old high school . . . ")

When I called, I was -- as I seem to have been so often -- in the throes of that state I've come to call terminal romance. It was compounded, as usual, by the other crises and confusions of my life. Michael, a self-taught expert on the subject of romantic angst, was commiserating. He was also being extremely patient with my tedious complaining. (I'm fortunate to have some friends who will tolerate my tales of woe until I bore myself with the repetition and come out of my funks.) As my lament wound down, Michael suggested, gently, "Somewhere your next lover is yawning and combing her hair."

*

A few weeks later, I went out to dinner with Henry. We've known and liked each other for several years, yet this was the first time we'd managed to spend an evening together. But I was so sunk into my gloom that I could talk of nothing else. Henry was very kind to me -- sympathetic, supportive, encouraging. (He even called me a poet.)

The next day I realized two things: that I had no doubt been tiresome to listen to, and that my nay-saying had bottomed out. I determined to write Henry a letter thanking him for letting me get the self-pity out of my system. Typically, it took me almost four months to find time to sit down and write it. Henry and I hadn't managed to get together again in the interval -- we both lead busy lives -- and I expressed my regret at the infrequency with which I get to see the people who really matter to me. Henry wrote back, "I just figure that this is a time in our collective lives when we work very hard. Hope there will be time for long afternoons in the cafés of the mind sooner or later."

*

While visiting my father this summer, I came across the manuscript of an article he'd written for one of the specialized magazines in his field. He's a self-made man, and a survivor; he's come out of three decades in the business world with a lot of experience, a lot of insight, and a lot of scar tissue. The article's a summation of what he's learned. In it, he recommends paranoia and schizophrenia as mental attitudes to be cultivated by those who would succeed in business. "There are men with knives behind every tree," he wrote. "Believe it! I know."

*

I hope these episodes suggest something about the texture of my life, the influences thereon and the polarities therein. On one hand -- that which holds my private sphere -- I find myself opening up more and more to the support and nourishment of friends, family, lovers and neighbors. With a certain sense of surprise, I watch myself encouraging my roots to grow deeper into the soil of my life -- becoming thereby considerably more fixed and more vulnerable, less able to duck, less free to cut and run. On the other hand -- the one which cups my vision of the outside world -- I find myself bracing for a storm.

These are strange times we inhabit. They remind me of nothing so much as the sad, gray, frightened 1950s I remember all too well, a pathetic decade that's now being romanticized by Hollywood. Nobody I know who lived through those years would relive them willingly. Yet we're swamped with movies, books, TV shows bent on whipping up nostalgia for one of our more dismal eras. We're only twenty-one years from the twenty-first century -- two decades from the millenium -- and apparently a large chunk of this society would prefer to roll back the clock to mid-century. (Indeed, there are some -- the majority of the Nixon Supreme Court among them -- who would step back into the last century if they could.)

It's a self-protective function, I think. We're in the middle of a major transformation -- technological, political, cultural, even spiritual -- and it's not surprising that frightened people are anxious to retreat into their visions of a time during which everything seemed safe, stable, unchanging. (Of course it's an illusion; Happy Days, indeed. The convulsions of the '60s were caused in large part by our failure to face and solve major problems which were apparent a decade earlier.)

But the future refuses to be side-stepped, and it cannot be escaped -- each and every morning we awaken in it. The only viable alternative is to confront it. And prepare oneself for an extended period of flux -- which means drastic redefinitions of everything we take for granted, major revisions of all our assumptions, massive confusion, chaos.

Have we, as humans, the capacity to survive this crisis? I think so; we are beings of virtually infinite resourcefulness, and what endangers us most is not the unknown itself but our terror of it. We are creatures of habit, for all our versatility; the unknown frightens us, and we tend to freeze when the snake of fear looks us in the eye.

Are we likely to come out of this stage unchanged? Hardly. What we are beginning to undergo is too massive and all-encompassing to leave us as we were. We are, I suspect, on the point of evolving, of moving yet another step along our path. This is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. Like any birth, it will be messy. Its impact may be traumatic. And the difference between where we are now, pressing on the cervix of time, and where we will find ourselves when we emerge, will be awesome.

Small wonder, then, that I find myself simultaneously reaching out to others in a search for community and battening down the hatches as the thunderheads roll closer. I don't feel unprepared to ride this one out -- as I wrote last time, much of my life to date seems now like a shake-down cruise -- but this storm may rage for a long, long time. Small comfort it will be (though surely better than no comfort at all) to think of Henry's "cafés of the mind" when just keeping my head above water may be the task at hand. For all I know, those long afternoons may not come round till 2008, and all the best cafés may be on Mars.