On February 22, 2011, "the house shook like a washing machine. The pantry collapsed. My dog took off in terror. And quite a lot of central Christchurch fell down", writes Joe Bennett. Photo / NZME
On February 22, 2011, "the house shook like a washing machine. The pantry collapsed. My dog took off in terror. And quite a lot of central Christchurch fell down", writes Joe Bennett. Photo / NZME
OPINION:
I write this on the 22nd of February 2022. How significant is that date? It's as significant as you want it to be, no more no less.
22/2/22 is one of only three dates this century that can be written as five identical digits. (The others were the 11thof January and the 1st of November 2011.) And since it will be 90 years before it happens again, this is the last time most of us will see it. So what?
Well, we have always attached significance to numbers. Seven is lucky, 13 isn't, and the Chinese never have an eighth floor. But numbers are artificial things. They don't occur in nature, and neither do dates. We impose both on a random world to try to create some order, but in nature there is only the endless sequence of moments, days and years, unnamed, uncounted and unrecorded, which constitute the ever-rolling present tense, the eternal now. It is where dogs and all wise creatures live, but we can't abide it. We crave significance.
Just as there are no dates in nature so there's actually no past. Time sweeps up everything as it rolls on and leaves nothing behind. But that won't do for us. We feel a need for history. It may be no more than ghosts and scraps of memory, partial, personal and quite irretrievable, but oh how we construct it and then cling to it.
On February 22, 2011, 11 years ago exactly, I had a cheese and pickle sandwich for lunch. It was a pleasant summer's day and as I ate I looked out of the window at a hawk circling. Then the house shook like a washing machine. The microwave flew across the kitchen. The pantry collapsed. My dog took off in terror. And quite a lot of central Christchurch fell down.
The earthquake has gone down in history, but the hawk and the sandwich have not. For even though our lives consist primarily of little things, the past that we agree on as the truth consists of larger things, of events.
Some 1126 years ago today, on February 22, 896, King Arnulf of Carinthia, who had overthrown his uncle Charles the Fat (I am not making this up), was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope.
No doubt a few peasants gawped at the coronation and no doubt some of them ate cheese and bread and pickles, but we know nothing of the sandwiches. We know about Arnulf, however, because he acquired power. History as we record it, is primarily the story of power, the terrible commodity that human beings fight for. What they fight over is land because from land comes wealth and from wealth comes power. Some land is lucky and rarely fought over; some is fought over time and time again.
Putin ordered troops into Ukraine on the 22nd of February 2022. Photo / AP
In 1918, World War I was drawing towards its conclusion in a muddy bloody stalemate on the western front, but there was another front in the east that we hear less about. Russia had been weakened by the Bolshevik revolution and the German army was advancing almost unopposed onto Russian soil. Eventually the Germans delivered an ultimatum and the Russians had little choice but to sign the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in which they ceded various territories to Germany. Chief among these was Ukraine. The date of the ultimatum was February 22.
As it happens, in the wash-up of World War I the Russians got Ukraine back. It was fought over again in the next war and both sides committed unspeakable atrocities there, but Russia retained it in the end and kept it 'til the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And even after that Russia manipulated Ukrainian politics and succeeded in installing a puppet president, Victor Yanukovych.
A popular uprising against Yanukovych was repressed by troops and bullets but eventually the Ukrainians drove Yanukovych from his palace and sent him fleeing back to Russia. At last it seemed Ukraine had achieved full independence. The date was February 22, 2014.
But almost immediately Russia sent troops in to annex Crimea and it has since fomented war in the east of the country. And now Putin has ordered troops into Ukraine, today, the February 22, 2022.
Dates may have no significance and history may not exist, but I wouldn't try to convince Ukrainians of either truth right now.
