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“Everyone up and left, but they left their dogs and cats. The first few days I went around pouring milk for all the cats, and I’d give the dogs a piece of bread. They were standing in their yards waiting for their masters. They waited for them a long time.” So said an old woman to the writer Svetlana Alexievich, now Nobel laureate, who included the woman’s words in her book about Chernobyl. Last week, Russian forces took the area on their way to Kyiv.

Illustration: Joe BenkeCredit:

Two weeks before the invasion, Alexievich told an interviewer that her relatives in Ukraine talked only about whether Russia would invade. Most did not feel there would be a war, she said. They were wrong, of course, as so many of us have been wrong about so many things these past few years.

One day we are reasonably confident our lives will continue as they are; the next we see how blind we have been. I was reminded, this week, of the day Donald Trump was elected, and that the shock so many of us felt was due not only to the way in which the world changed that day, but, as Paul Krugman noted at the time, to the various ways in which the world had already changed and which most of us had failed to notice.

The pandemic forced a similar adjustment. It brought actual change, of course – but a huge part of the past two years is what we have been forced to see: the precariousness of the ways so many of us live, the terrible priorities we have largely accepted as though they are natural. Our world changed, but so did our awareness of the world we had already been living in for some time.

There have been two reactions to the invasion of Ukraine that have surprised me with their force and frequency. One is how upset people I know are. That sounds heartless – I don’t mean that people should not be upset. I mean that there are many devastating global events that do not have this effect; events that do not invite spontaneous messages and comments about how terrible this is.

It seems likely that this is tied to the other reaction: the widespread observation that these particular events seem unimaginable – as someone I saw interviewed put it, they feel like something that belongs to 1922, not 2022. But this seems an odd reaction, because there have been recent wars, even wars in Europe, even wars in Europe involving Russia.

To give one example in the second category: Russia expert Masha Gessen, in refutation of “unimaginability”, recently wrote of being in Belgrade, just over 20 years ago, when NATO bombs began to fall on that city: when “the unimaginable became real”.

Do we really mean “unimaginable” then? In recent years three major global events have, I think, brought with them this sense of disbelief: Trump’s rise, the pandemic, and now Ukraine. Not one of the three events was unimaginable, exactly – all had been imagined, even predicted by reasonable numbers of experts.

Each was, however, close to monolithic in the way it commanded the world’s attention. And our attention is there for the taking in a way it once was not. W.H. Auden wrote of the way that suffering always occurred while “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”. That will always be true, but it seems slightly less true in an age when, while walking dully along, we are checking tweets and groupchats for the latest news on the invasion. If this particular war is not unimaginable in any specific way, it is, at least on a superficial level, inescapable.

Perhaps it is the very inescapability of these events that makes us so desperate, afterwards, to escape them absolutely – to forget quickly what we have learned. After Trump, there was a sense that the world might return to what it had been. Many people approached COVID much the same way. And perhaps this Russian storm will soon pass, and we will go back to our lives.

I wonder, though, if Russia’s aggression is deeply upsetting to so many people not directly affected partly because of the cumulative effect of these events. Nor are they the only factors that have contributed. Other massive global events of recent years – Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movement – were important for related reasons, challenging many of us (though many were all too aware) to see the world as it was, and not how we had believed or pretended it was. Perhaps at some point, in the face of events that challenge your sense of established reality, it becomes difficult to avoid facing up to your own personal reckoning about the illusions you have maintained.

We are rarely entirely blind, though. As Gessen observed several weeks ago, doublethink in Ukraine was widespread. Some of Alexievich’s relatives, who did not think that war would come, had, she said, begun hoarding flour and matches nonetheless. Now they have been forced to leave one of those realities behind; they have decisively entered the other.

As for those of us who are so far relatively unaffected by Russia, or Trump, or perhaps even the pandemic, we can wait, hoping or even believing that the reality we believed will soon come back to us and wrap us up in its embrace. But we will likely end up like those dogs, standing in their yards, waiting for a very long time.

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