Odilon Redon’s Cauldron of the Sorceress, 1879.

In the festive weeks leading up to Christmas, I was approached by a number of friends and acquaintances eager to offer best wishes and, as is customary with me, ask me to weigh in on the state of the world. They do this not because I am a retired world leader but because I am American, which after all these years still somehow qualifies me as an erudite observer of the global scene.

At 70, nearly blind and cancer-burdened, I am in fact no such thing. My decades of newspaper work are behind me, and I frankly prefer fiction to current events, once a heresy.

This said, I am not dead to the zeitgeist. The flavor of time interests me especially as it regards those who purvey it to me, and most of them, it occurred to me recently, are five, 10, or even 15 years older than me. These are men — and they are mostly men — of the postwar period, men who came of age in the ’50s and ’60s. Hardened men. Worried men. Men for whom the world order was, in the then-bipolar world, always in jeopardy.

Out “there” was the Soviet Union, already casting a nefarious shadow and by nature invested in spreading its pall.

But this is 2024, and that pall is long gone. One would think my Christmas visitors would be more hopeful.

Not even a little.

Instead, they came at me as if to form a line of male Cassandras, each one intent on emphasizing doom, gloom, and peril.

They came at me as if to form a line of male Cassandras, each one intent on emphasizing doom, gloom, and peril.

One friend who’d spent a lifetime in television told me he could no longer sleep at night, such was his fear about present and future. He tossed around names and places, Putin and Gaza, China and Taiwan, COVID and its incessant aftermath, and the Ukraine War–induced trend toward the East, with it once and for all ending the postwar Western order.

“Alas, my friend, times are bleak,” he told me, handing me a present of chocolates, which he’d forgotten I do not eat.

A few days later I met a friend who runs a publishing house that for decades published works by leading Italian internationalists. Now, his firm works entirely on the Internet and is active, thanks to a young staff, on social media.

“Merry Christmas” he exclaimed, before lapsing into a bridge of sighs: kids stuck on video games, addiction to cellphones, the fantastic but perilous growth of artificial intelligence. War and more war, “everywhere,” and sure to expand, though how he did not say.

Finally, at least for my purposes, was my oldest friend, a lay cleric who worked for years in the Vatican before losing faith, literally, and joining a Christian activist group that assists refugees and boat-people castaways, people no one wants.

He said two things: “Merry Christmas” and “May God have mercy on our souls.”

Out-of-control immigration, population growth, the climate behaving in ways so strange the hand of God would seem to suggest the coming arrival of cactus in winter. Had I read, he asked me, of Henry Kissinger’s dire warnings, spoken just months before his recent death at 100? Had I picked up on the words of Noam Chomsky, now 95, that the times in which we live are the most dangerous in human history?

Taking in this avalanche of anxiety, one thing struck me.

My three friends total nearly 250 years in age. Add the likes of Chomsky, the now-dead Kissinger, and a number of others, including the sitting president of the United States and his noxious adversary, and you get a group of men who, if their ages are summed up, would have lived from the times of Charlemagne to the present.

Bravo to modern medicine, which has extended human life, but within the “bravo” resides a catch.

The older men get, and the closer by extension to their own farewells, the more they fall prey to the tug of farewell, which is rife with nostalgia, sentimentality, exaggeration, and a deep-seated fear that the worst of that which percolates around them is the worst ever. The longer one is present on Earth, the greater the seeming peril, this because the aged have no means to repair it, only to fret.

Among those plunged into the outer rings of life, a feeling arises that all is out of control, that balance is gone. These late-life fears are as much a product of musing on a future the elderly will not live to see than an objective worsening of the global scene. It has much in common with the expression “in my day,” once a staple of those looking back but erased as life expectancy was extended. Now, elderly statesmen and intellectuals are expected to look ahead, not behind, and with that comes a bleak world view at least in part conditioned by personal intimations of mortality. If you’re in the departure lounge, best to suggest you have little interest in dealing with a rottenly menacing status quo.

Had I read, he asked me, of Henry Kissinger’s dire warnings, spoken just months before his recent death at 100?

In a nutshell, my Christmas friends and their Cassandra cohorts exaggerate. It’s sincere and informed exaggeration, but exaggeration nonetheless. Bombarded by news and podcast feeds the likes of which they never knew in their youth. Age collates new-age “Cassandrism” with the heaped-up recollections of older fears, nuclear war foremost among them, and delivers a scathing, even dead-end view of what might lie ahead.

Called upon to listen to members of the Cold War generation, and my Christmas imposed such a calling, I emerged infected, as if the virus of recent years had contaminated the once-balanced art of looking ahead. Not one of my arthritic brothers in arms, nary a one, had hope on their minds, not with Trump redux looming and Putin-Gaza seeming to sicken the future.

This disappoints me, a blind, dark soul still possessed of a kind of pessimistic optimism based on a sense that gloom often rebuffs those who dwell on it. The times of greatest threat can also be the times of greatest promise. The worst of times is also the best of times, as a man named Dickens once suggested.

Once upon a time — the year was 1977 — I interviewed the Italian poet and Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale. Europe was in a mess, the Middle East likewise, with the West mired in recession. Moscow had begun moving mobile missile launchpads into satellite states, raising fears of war in Europe. “What about the future?” I asked Montale. “It seems to me,” Montale said, “that [the future] is like some great pot bubbling on the stove. All is being tossed into it, but no one knows what will emerge, whether some great wizard or a terrible monster.”

To the doomsayers I propose a wizard, so that for a moment they might relent.