The End ...

The power is out in this part of the world, and we poor survivors huddle around the glowing laptops, coaxing messages through the dial-up connection. Soon, the reserves will fail, and darkness will close over us, the end of civilization as we know it.

A number of years ago, when the Queen visited this part of the world just in time for one of these Pacific storms, one of the political cartoonists drew her trudging off the plane, bedraggled, dripping wet, and pulling an upturned umbrella behind her, the caption being something along the lines of, Did we have a good time, Ma’am?

I was interested in reader Pat’s comments to the last post, indicating that not only is such supersensitivity as possesses the title character in Touchstone an actual known condition, but that how he got there is related to the shaman’s journey.

Eighty years ago, the causes of “shell shock” were under fervent debate--post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) existed long before the name came around. No one outside a small number of anthropologists had heard the term “shaman.” Writing a book set in 1926, one is limited by common knowledge. Experientially, Touchstone’s Bennett Grey just knew what he knew, and it would be nearly a century before neurologists explored the amygdale gland’s contribution to stressful situations, and just as long before Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, his book that explores the phenomenon of knowing in an instant.