Motus Mentis

Reading the news in these last days, I’ve been trying to find the right word to describe how it feels to watch the briskly accelerating disorder of all our civic and political affairs. “Shocked” won’t do, as I’ve been expecting it for years. “Appalled”? Well, yes, of course, but that doesn’t really catch all of it either. So what is the right word? What is it called when you begin to think, over a span of decades, that a thing previously unthinkable might, in fact, come to pass, and then it turns out you were right all along to think so?

Early on, the overwhelming unthinkableness of the thing brings you right back down to earth; you shy away from even talking about it, because people will think you’re just playing at being overwrought, and inwardly you chide yourself for taking it seriously even for a moment.

But from time to time, some little thing comes along — a news story, perhaps, or a remark by a friend or stranger — in which you recognize a general tilting ever so slightly more toward the possibility of the Unthinkable Thing, or at least incrementally less tilting away from it. And so, little by little as the years go by, you begin to feel more certain that you really are discerning a kind of tectonic motion, always in the same direction — that is, toward what you still must say, if you sit upright and get a proper hold of yourself for a moment, is quite unthinkable.

But the motion is stubborn. It persists. Mostly it creeps as imperceptibly as an hour-hand. Every now and then it jerks forward enough that you really get your ears up for a moment, but then it might even seem to creep backward for a bit, in a reassuring sort of way. You relax again, for a little while, but over time you’re surer and surer that you aren’t just making things up.

Then comes a day when you look around you and are quite certain — no doubt about it now! — that this thing that used to be over here is now way over there, and that you aren’t imagining it at all. You start to mention it to people who might not have been paying attention as closely as you have, but they mostly think you’re starting to have odd ideas, and maybe some of your friends begin to keep their distance.

So you start writing about it, and in doing so you meet others who have been noticing just as you have, which is a comfort — it’s good to know you aren’t the only one — but the fact that others have noticed as well means that things really are creeping, and occasionally jerking, in the direction of the Unthinkable Thing, the thing that you once upon a time (it was quite a few years ago now) thought you were silly even to imagine, because it really couldn’t happen, not here.

Then at last, when things have moved so far that it really must be obvious to everyone by now that we are becoming dangerously close to the Unthinkable Thing — which to you and your small band of observant friends now looms so large and so close that it blots out the sky like a leaping tiger — all of a sudden, a lot of people do start to notice, all at once, and they become very, very alarmed.

But by then, of course, it’s too late, because the unthinkable has already happened.

That’s what it’s been like. What’s the word for that? If there isn’t one, there ought to be.