How’s this for an opening paragraph?
In 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London; the dying were boarded up in their homes with their families, and a decree went out that the theaters, the bear-baiting and the brothels be closed. It was then that Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at the precarity:
The dead man’s knell Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps Dying or ere they sicken.As he wrote the words, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern sea.
I’m quoting from one of Katherine Rundell’s essays in The Golden Mole, a book of luminous animal stories that I’ve found plenty of inspiration in before. What I love about this opening paragraph is how Rundell makes us feel the age of the Greenland Shark: you can tell us they live for up to 500 years, or you can show us that their lives overlap with two events that - by any other consideration - seem disparately apart.
The Greenland Shark’s longevity doesn’t just impress me, it disorients me too. One of the comforting things about the past is that it’s, well, passed. Shakespeare and plague are about as historical as you could get, but through the lens of the Greenland Shark, Rundell makes both these things feel shockingly contemporary. I feel two times rubbing up against each other, erasing the neat bounds of periodisation as they do.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how writers use ‘meanwhile.’ It’s a classic storytelling technique, a way of making a narrative multifaceted and grand. Sam and Frodo cross the Dead Marshes, meanwhile Pippin and Merry attend the Entmoot. That events in a story can be happening at the same time is quietly radical: we must keep straight multiple timelines in our mind, and we must recognise that the protagonists are one of many forces in the world, working in all manner of directions, in all manner of stories. As a child, meanwhile made me wonder what else was happening off the page. What other stories were not being told?
I love Rundell’s meanwhile because it makes me think about how this Greenland Shark has been in the background of history all along. As the Haitian Revolution waged, as Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, during the Meiji Restoration and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, the same shark swam in the depths of the Arctic Ocean. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile.
Is meanwhile useful to historians? We certainly prize ourselves as great contextualisers: give us a text, an object, a story and we’ll scaffold it in context. This context is usually precise, insightful, relevant. I wonder if we might get irreverent, creative, unexpected. I wonder if we could use it to discover the contingencies and uncertainties of the past as it happened; not to solidify a story with a protagonist and an outcome, but to capture the feeling of smallness in a large world, the way our historical subjects might have felt.
Here’s my attempt, reaching back to the Ancient World.
Summer 165CE. The doctors had given up on Aelius Aristides. His strength failing, his stomach filled with a burning, nausea-inducing liquid, Aelius could no longer eat. His friends and foster-sister gathered around him in the temple expecting that these might be his final days. Sweating, white-faced, Aelius twisted to the inside of his bed. ‘I seemed even to be at the end of the play,’ he wrote in later years, ‘to be going to take my father’s shoes.’ But then a scent like wax wafted over his bed and turned him out. Stood before him was the goddess Athena, brandishing a shield. Aelius cried out that the goddess stood in the room but only he could see her. His carers, he tells us, thought him delirious - until Athena whispered to them all that Aelius must persevere. Taking honey, goose liver and sausage, Aelius’ health was restored.
Meanwhile, across the empire, people grew sicker. It began with bouts of debilitating diarrhea and spread through the body: lungs hacking, coughing up blood. Within a week, a rash spread pustules over the skin and formed black sores that grew itching crusts before falling away. In Italy, the desperate wrote divine words above their door to keep the plague at bay to no avail. Within a year, the Emperor’s physician Galen had exhausted his remedies - soil from Arminia, milk from Stabiae, a young boy’s fresh urine - with little success. Over the next decade, a quarter of the infected died.
Meanwhile, within the aching city of Rome, the writer Tatian wrote a letter to the Greeks. Like Aelius Aristides, he had made a career from his words but, unlike Aelius, he turned his tongue against the Greek gods. ‘Are not the demons themselves, with Zeus at their head, subjected to Fate, overcome by the same passions as men?’ he asked. He sketched the Greek gods as contradictory and crass: ‘Artemis is a poisoner; Apollo heals diseases. And after the decapitation of the Gorgon… whence sprang the horse Pegasus and Chrysaor, Athena and Asclepios divided between them the drops of blood; and, while he saved men’s lives by means of them, she, by the same blood, became a murderer and the instigator of wars.’ This was the first attack on Paganism in Christian writings. It will be the first of many efforts to erode the gods.
Meanwhile, to the east, Lucius Verus led his troops into the desert to conquer the city of Dura Europos. For two hundred and seventy years, the city had been in the hands of the Parthian Empire, who had reaped profits from its position on a trade route between the Mediterranean and China. This was a way that soldiers, merchants and travellers would pass - a frontier of the empire, a melting pot for cultures and language, a gathering place for gods, a departure lounge for disease.
Meanwhile, to the west, silver mines and quarries closed. Workers who had built their lives around imperial demand found themselves out of work, hungry and restless in the fields. The sky cleared of the heavy smoke coughed up by silver-smelting. In Greenland, the wide white meadows of ice drank in the air. Two thousand years later, ice cores drilled out of the ground will feature noticeably less lead.
Meanwhile, serene and ignorant of anything happening down on Earth, Halley’s comet cuts through the inky black of space. It has been twenty four years since a human eye last caught this glowing space rock, in China, in April 141CE. But the rock continues to tumble through the vast halls of the cosmos, biding time. When it next enters into human view, Aelius, Galen, Tatian, Lucius Verus, all will be dead. The year will be 218 CE and the next lot of living will be worried about very different things.
Meanwhile, in Smyrna, a few miles from where Aristides was rallying, tragedy struck. His foster son, whose name has not survived the passage of time, contracted an illness and died. Aristides will not learn for some days, perhaps protected from the news during his recovery, perhaps the news unable to travel for fear of carrying disease with it. In later years, Aristides reflected, ‘He died, as I later learned, on the same day as my disease ended. Thus I had my life up to this time as bounty from the Gods, and after this, I was given a new life from the Gods.’ What we don’t know is the foster son’s testimony: whether he felt his strength go, whether he suffered a pustular rash, whether he turned to the Gods in his moments of weakness, whether he took Arminian soil or dreamt of the inky black halls to which he would soon go.
In every room in every house in Smyrna and the empire, lives played out that are now gone. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile.
We know about Aelius Aristides’ illness because he wrote an account of twenty years of illness called the Sacred Tales. In the tales, he’s regularly visited by gods, throws himself into multiple rivers, describes in depth the movement of his guts. As I’ve said before, the past is so much more vivid and weird than you think.
One of my favourite ‘meanwhiles’ in fiction comes from War and Peace. Tolstoy describes Count Pierre heading out into the snowy streets of Moscow, consumed by the bittersweet regrets of unrequited love. Looking up into the sky, his human story collides with another narrative.
It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised. At the entrance to the Arbát Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the Prechístenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812—the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly—like an arrow piercing the earth—to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.