Excerpt from 'Notes on the Twentieth Century' by Hans Koning

OF course, the division of time is arbitrary, and has as little meaning as a child's chalk mark on an endless road. A year as a unit of time has a natural significance only on our own planet. The decimal system has practicality because we have ten fingers, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Decades and centuries are just bookkeeping units that help us in our ordering and arranging.

Nonetheless, we can assign the twentieth century a visible face, a character. I know what I mean when I write that in 1900 the world was young. Indeed, humanity in our corner of the world has aged through the century -- aged by losing a chunk of its innocence and hope, aged also in the sense of matured, by having become wiser because of what we have gone through, less arrogant, less cruel, less biased -- if, often, only by being more conscious of how we should think and act.

How to wind up these random notes? By asking that we not look at the changes around us in the resigned manner of European peasants or Native Americans watching the railroads invade their lands. The changes presented to us, or put over on us, at the end of the century come from our near neighbors, our fellow men and women. They can be turned to the good or to the bad. They are not fated.

Their perimeters must be our common decision.
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