Note from Taiwan: The Players on the Eve of Destruction

I’d like some help finding a poem, if any of you happen to know it. I read it when I was a teenager, and I forget who it was by — possibly Louise Gluck. Anyway, the poem was about a woman watching two happy young lovers, and wanting to warn them that their love would eventually fade.

It’s hard to avoid a similar kind of maudlin feeling when I visit Taiwan, as I now have every year since 2022. New Year’s Eve in Taipei is something worth seeing — an entire shopping district in the middle of the city gets closed off and flooded with young people, basically becoming a gigantic all-night block party.

At midnight, right in the middle of that party, fireworks shoot off of the city’s towering skyscraper, Taipei 101. It’s the kind of thing safety regulations would never allow in America, and probably not even in Japan. Everyone cheers wildly, and they dance and drink until morning.

As the fireworks exploded and thousands cheered, I was suddenly reminded not just of that poem about the two lovers, but of some bit characters from the Iain M Banks novel “Consider Phlebas.”

The Players on the Eve of Destruction were gamblers who would travel around the galaxy to places about to undergo an epic catastrophe — a supernova, a war, and so on — and play games right up until the very last moment. I wondered if I was one of them now.

Humanity’s curse is that we can peer into the future. We see a pandemic begin to spread, and we know that in a few weeks it will probably be everywhere. We see banks begin to fail, and we know that in a few months a lot of people will probably be out of a job. When my rabbit has to go to the veterinarian, I’m nervous hours in advance, while he calmly munches hay, oblivious to the onrushing inevitability of