In the early months of the year, rivers overflowed their banks. "A spirit of change and recklessness seemed to pervade the very inhabitants of the forest," a naturalist wrote afterward. Squirrels inexplicably marched southward in migration, tens of thousands at a time. They plunged heedlessly into the Ohio River and drowned. Earthquakes reversed the flow of the Mississippi so that its waters surged upstream at the speed of galloping horses. Whole forests fell down, like stacked fields of rifles toppling. A double-tailed comet appeared in the night sky over America.
All of that happened in the annus mirabilis of 1811, a year of wonders.
Twenty years ago, in 1968, America -- and much of the world as well -- felt the dislocations of another annus mirabilis.
Nineteen sixty-eight had the vibrations of earthquake about it. America shuddered. History cracked open: bats came flapping out, dark surprises. American culture and politics ventured into dangerous and experimental regions: uplands of new enlightenments, some people thought, and quagmires of the id. The year was pivotal and messy. It produced vivid theater. It reverberates still in the American mind.
Nineteen sixty-eight was tragedy and horrific entertainment: deaths of heroes, uprisings, suppressions, the end of dreams, blood in the streets of Chicago and Paris and Saigon, and at last, at Christmastime, man for the first time floating around the moon.
One is sometimes incredulous now at 1968, not only at the astonishing sequence of events but at the intensity, the energy in the air. People lived their lives, of course. And yet the air of public life seemed to be on fire, and that public fire singed the private self. Revolutionary bombast gusted across the wake of elegy for something in America that had got lost, some sense of national innocence and virtue. More than in ordinary times, people thought about death, about spiritual fulfillment, and about transfiguration.
The nation pulsed with music and proclamation, with rages and moral pretensions. "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius," sang the cast of Hair, which came to Broadway in April. Janis Joplin expressed one side of the year fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe, flirting with the abyss. Joplin, who died of a heroin overdose in 1970, memorably sang Me and Bobbie McGee, the 1969 Kris Kristofferson song that contained a perfect line of 1968 philosophy, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
But driving across Indiana in early May 1968, searching for Bobby Kennedy's whistle-stop campaign, one heard another chord as well -- Paul Simon's wistful note of disconnection: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you."