The Beginning

Once upon a time, when someone wanted to begin a story, they began at the beginning.  That is, they began at the earliest point in time.  Then the storyteller would incrementally stack events, one atop the other, until they reached a critical height and all came tumbling down to rest.  This is no longer the case.  It's become old hat to begin with a man's dying breath, or that of his great-grandson blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and then proceed in both directions.  A storyteller may begin in the near future with the discovery of a long-deceased politician's diary, whose facts will illuminate the true cause of a coming catastrophe that can only be averted by the chance actions of the protagonist in the present.  I could begin this story by listing the origins of every ingredient in a particular woman's meal on October 19, 1983, and only in the end of the ninth chapter get around to telling you that the final ingredient was strychnine.  And I bet you would read it, too, so long as I filled it with compelling trivia.

This is because you know the old beginning to be a lie.  First, it is a lie because it presents a false sense of time, with an origin, a series of resulting effects and a final conclusion.  While there is a profound harmony between actions and reactions, we can not say that event x caused reaction y just because x is at t = 1 and y is at t = 2.  If we look at time as running from t = 5 down to t = 0, y appears to cause x.  Excepting the most clinical of examples, if you placed x at t = 3 instead of t = 1, would you get the same result?  If you moved x from point A to point B?  What if you simply turned back time and started the original scenario over again at t = 1?  Would y follow x 100% of the time?  Given a story as complex as the ones we live every day, the answer is almost definitely, "No." 

Second, the old beginning is a lie because it already existed in the author's mind long before the reader heard the first word.  It probably started as a visionary fragment, a compelling scene near the end of the progress, from which the author built forward and backward, stringing together fragments by sweat or serendipity, until he or she was ready to present to you, finally, the beginning.

In contrast, this beginning is the beginning for us both.  Like you, I don't know what will follow, and I will discover it as you do.  Thus we begin -- I a few steps before you, but nevertheless together.  Once we begin, we may find ourselves at any point at all in time, and we may go forward or backward or jump wildly between, but we won't know until we take a step inside.  So I place the first step before you and set the course for the rest of our voyage with this simple, one-word title:

Westerners