The Times are a-changin'

I had hoped that my final newspaper column would be a little more poetic than this.

I hadn't thought about specifics - I always assumed there would be time for that - but I had a vague plan to produce the sort of valedictory speech, full of wit and pathos, that leaves people balancing between laughter and tears.

Of course, there is never time, and vague plans are not any sort of plan at all. Besides, these moments have a way of arriving all in a rush, and you only think of what to say once they're past.

I suppose the first thing I should say is that this isn't my final opinion piece. But it is my last one in the print incarnation of The Times, a newspaper that you can page through and linger over and spill your coffee on.

In a few weeks my colleagues and I will be plugged into the matrix, and our words, instead of being painted onto thinly-sliced wood, will become zeroes and noughts, floating about in a cosmos of content that is infinitely huge and full and yet somehow still feels empty.

The second thing I should say is that this isn't as gloomy as it sounds. It doesn't feel like an ending. Rather, it feels like an experience, as if the smooth, dispassionate unfolding of time has been made briefly tangible, like standing on a huge cogwheel in some ancient machine as it advances, clunk, by one notch.

Change is alarming. For a species that took hundreds of thousands of years to figure out how to cook food with fire, the last hundred years have been a mind-melting rush strapped to the nose of a rocket pointed straight at What The Actual Hell. It's in our DNA to drop anchor and demand that everybody just calms down for a moment.

But every so often it can be pleasing to cast off our assumptions about the here and now and to drift a little more freely on the tides of time. For example, I find it reassuring to remember that we are apes who have taken a wrong turn somewhere between the woods and the river and accidentally invented gods and money and nuclear weapons, and that all we really need is love, or someone to pick the lice off us (which is sort of like love), and bananas. It comforts me to remember that everything that is written in stone will, one day, be written in sand.

Perhaps this is a socially irresponsible position to take; a surrender to apathy disguised as perspective. Certainly, when you remember Persepolis or Babylon, Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma look both inevitable and irrelevant.

But I think it can also be useful when change feels overwhelming, because it reminds us that change is always, literally, overwhelming. It floods over the dykes of the status quo, sweeps away the vain little monuments to permanence - and yet here we still are. Change happens all the time, and on we go.

As a columnist, I am about to change. I am about to leave print and become a tiny piece of history: one of those forgotten harpsichord-makers who started making pianos, or one of the nameless buggy-upholsterers who supplied seat cushions to Henry Ford.

But I won't be alone. In the coming year, all of us will be asked to change.

The ANC will decide whether it can change into a modern political party, capable of weaning itself off the teat of unchecked corruption, or whether it will make the easier change into masters of a failed state. South African corporations will have to change our perception of them as a sanctimonious mafia.

Some, however, won't change, at least not yet. We call them misogynists and racists, but they are ultimately the castaways of history. Clinging to rafts cobbled together out of prehistoric fear, medieval self-righteousness and Victorian pseudo-science, they have washed ashore in the 21st century, hopelessly marooned and terribly angry about it.

And so they will continue to lash out and poison our view of ourselves. But it's worth remembering that even they can be changed, because nothing is forever: not buildings, not countries, and certainly not beliefs and prejudices.

In the end, only one thing remains: that this, too, shall pass.