by Cassandra

1.
One thing you learn when you’ve been at this dreadful prediction game as long as I have, my dears, is the Universal Law of Divination and Prophecy:

No matter how bad or good things are,
they can—and probably will—get worse.

Many humans, too clever for their own good, have erected vast, profitable structures of commerce, governance, education, and—yes—religion on the utter reliability of this immutable law.

Put another way: The sunnier the day, the darker the storm.

Think, please, of that sunniest of English days known as the Edwardian Age, when England—and indeed the rest of Europe and America as well—afloat on an unprecedented sea of wealth and prosperity and amused by all manner of gadgets flowing from the Industrial Revolution preened and strutted with complete self-indulgence, certain that Eden had at last arrived on earth.

You needn’t worry your aliterate head about how the art and artists of the time responded. All that we post-millennial visualists need to realize is how poorer our own world would be without the Edwardians because without them and their manifold and manifest follies, there would be no Merchant-Ivory films.

With no hint of the horror to come—the little slaughter-machine known as World War I (among a number of other examples), oh how they frolicked.

Now here we are, my dears, a hundred years on, frolicking like mad ourselves, innocent of care, ignorant of doomsayers, choosing to think that days of such delightfully dappled sunlight and endless SUV-motivated freeway forays and knowledge on tap can never end.

2.
Those free of the curse of prophecy under which such as I labor think, I have learned, that we the cursed exist in a constant state of awareness of Things to Come, that we lurk by roadsides in neon-adorned cottages advertising our wares ("Psyhic: Mme Ouspenskaya Sees All!") the better to lure the unwary and unenlightened into our be-entrailed clutches.

Not quite so, my dears.

Every occupation has its quacks. (Consider the preachers of the field, how they neither toil nor spin yet rake in riches beyond accounting from the gullible.)

So too mine.

The harsh reality into which my own gift of foresight has plunged me is exquisite in its excruciating simplicity: No, I do NOT exist in a constant awareness of what’s to come. I am rather vouchsafed only the most infrequent, intermittent, and—need I add—unsought glimpses through the curtain that veils all our futures so completely.

Imps unbidden by me will, often at the most inopportune moment, pull the curtains apart, wink mischievously, and say, "Here, look!" No sooner have I looked than they let the curtains close again and I’m left in that state of boggled bafflement that history has come to know as, to coin a word, "Cassandra-ness." I glimpse, I recoil in horror, I speak what I have seen… and no one believes me.

3.
On a recent autumn Saturday lovely enough to be the centerpiece of, yes, a Merchant-Ivory production, I found myself in an improbable corner of our present, early-21st-century free-market Eden: Round Top, Texas, site of the Round Top Institute, itself host to the Round Top Music Festival, an artistic undertaking of both quality and quantity that few Americans would expect to found outside of New England, much less deep in the heart of Texas.

But there it is in the forested, gently rolling hills between Houston and Austin, where pianist James Dick has overseen the construction of first-rate facilities for the performance of and instruction in the musical arts.

Centerpiece is the large main concert hall, a charming, unpretentious cupola-ed structured whose many-windowed exterior gives no hint of what is within: a performing space whose walls, balconies, boxes, ceiling and stage are cloaked completely in dark, lovingly carved oak. A little bit of Bavaria come to Texas, not unmindful of Bayreuth itself though in its tasteful modesty totally lacking the bloated grandeur of that and similar European musical venues.

Near the end of the particular concert I had gone there to attend, I moved to the back of the hall, the better to, well, attend both the performance and the hall itself. Immersed happily in the sound and spectacle, I was quite unprepared when my imps—who generally do know how best to catch one off-guard—chose to open the curtain.

You, like generations before, gentle Reader, do not want to know what Cassandra saw. Stop here and get on with your Edenic pursuits, lest you want your Paxilated days and your Vicodinized nights unduly disturbed.

4.
Very well. Against my advice you have chosen to read on.

The curtains of time parted for just a moment. I saw the future—nearer than any of us would wish—of what I was seeing in the present. Before my unwilling eyes, there lay lovely hall as a ruin, empty, open to the sky, and I knew that it would be seen and experienced thus by countless more eyes than the number who had seen and experienced it undamaged and whole.

And—however much ill you may wish for even the best of Texas, not just Round Top, my dears. Through the parted curtains I saw clearly the coming demise of our whole vast, lovely world with its carefully wrought, intricate, delicate structure and infrastructure, a widespread collapse that would take us inheritors of the wind into depths as dark and unimagined as those into which our precursors a hundred years ago were plunged in 1914.

In my fleeting vision this soon-desolate plain of Central Texas stood in for other numberless, soon-to-be desolated plains around the world.

Cautionary Afterword
Thus, my dears, has your Cassandra discharged her cursed responsibilities, futilely reminding her non-listening fellows of what comes next, which they all say they want desperately to know but which, when they come to it, none want to know.

The sharp reader may have noticed that here, as so often in the past, I’ve not told all, have in fact left out a good bit: what specific dire events, the sharp reader asks, lie between this Edenic now and that ruined future?

Cassandra smiles delphicly (my imps would, I think, say "sweetly") and comments, "I’ve given you the end, which you do not heed. Why should I waste my breath giving you the beginning and the middle as well?"

Hear the clamor! "Oh, we want to know, we want to know! Forewarned is forearmed! We’ll prepare for the worst if you’ll but tell us what we need to prepare for!"

Inclined to hasten home, retire to her garden, and tending, wait, Cassandra lets her Delphic smile morph to a Gorgon grin.

"Very well. One word, I give you one word from other times and places when the curtain’s opened. One word: deluge. Sure enough, old Earth’s going to give herself a much-needed spit bath, cleansing her shores and a good bit else. A good mother, she will moderate, though what for her is moderation will be disaster for ants (and others). Wave upon rising wave of loveliest translucent green seawater will come and come, rendering what is now beach, submarine play areas for fishes, and what now passes for civilization and culture and commerce a good fifty feet above what is now beaches, new beaches, prime property (after some good while, of course) for re-development."