Poised for what?

I have been reading two books - well, more than that but two in particular that have come to be linked in my mind somehow. One is A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary written by a female journalist living in Berlin in the weeks after it fell to the Russians at the end of World War II. It's very grim and I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it; the main take-away is the enormous incidence of rape by Russian soldiers of German women and girls. The second is A Chronicle of the Last Pagans by Pierre Chuvin, about the Roman Empire in late antiquity. Enrico had picked it up at the library as part of his quest to Understand Italy, and then I picked it up as a reprieve from the relentless grimness of wartime Berlin.

Both of these books feed into a swirl of thought that has rattled in my brain for a while now, thinking about people at other moments in history and whether they had a sense of what their world was poised for. People sitting on the verge of great conflagrations, or change. What did people reading the newspaper in the US in 1938 think? Did they have any inkling of what was to come? Do people ever have an inkling?

I know that by definition it's not possible to know the future, but I look at the times we're in and I wonder what we're on the edge of. And so I feel a strange sense of connection back through history with people of those times, living their regular lives, perhaps feeling great unease at the way things are going. And I'm fascinated by accounts of people living through great upheaval, the dismantling of their life's most basic daily realities as well as their society's foundational structures and assumptions; who find themselves adapting to conditions they never could have imagined a few years or weeks or days before - whether in Berlin or Lebanon.

"And yet it is worthwhile to take the viewpoint of the vanquished - those who seem to have been behind their own times - while bearing in mind that they did not consider themselves defeated or backward...Today we are too prone to believe that their world was dramatically collapsing. Accordingly, we readily attribute to the Romans of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. our own deceptive luidity, mixed with the bitter resignation of 'waiting for the Barbarians'...In reality, never was imperial power more efficient, more absolute, more centralized. And the events that appear singularly ominous to our eyes - the invasions of the Huns or the Goths - would have appeared to contemporaries as difficulties of a familiar kind, which would have to be dealt with sooner or later in any case."
- - Pierre Chauvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans