It is 2016. At 75, my life lying before me is far less than the life I've lived. This is the age when people are usually uneasy with the present, because in the 21st century the present is increasingly whipped along by the future. The technology surrounding us is not there for right now: fast trains, solar energy cars, hologram communication... life seems to be moving without pausing in the present.

If there is one icon that marks our times, it is the hand phone. The Indonesian word for it is perfect: 'telepon genggam' or 'clutched phone'. We can clutch it any time, anywhere, but it, too, can hold us in its clutches any time, anywhere. Whenever someone sits alone in a corner, or together with a friend in a caf, on a crowded bus or attends a village meeting, out comes the HP from the pocket, eyes scan the messages on the narrow screen, and attention is momentarily diverted. More often than not, conversation stops.

A militant is someone who makes himself vanish in order to become something effective, terrifying, overwhelming. Saaman, the character in Pramoedya's novel Keluarga Gerilya (The Guerilla Family), is at age 23 already a guerilla leader in Jakarta then occupied by Dutch forces, and he plans a series of killingsincluding that of his own stepfather who is on the other side. Saaman is captured. But he knows he has to die, just as he has to kill. He is a militant.

What can we do with the past, when we stand stunned in the ruins of Hatra?

Hatred is strength. Anger is force. Darth Vader understood this. And probably so, too, those who have formulated political words and acts since the 20th century: from Hitler to Donald Trump, from Stalin to IS, from the Ku Klux Klan to Pol Pot, from the Red Guards to the Islamic Defenders Front. They incite anger, they spread hatred, and then they turn both of them into 'ideology' and from then on who knows how many victories are celebrated and how many millions of bodies pile up.

Since time immemorial, enmity between 'the Dark side' and 'the Light' has been the stuff of legend; in the third century CE a Persian called the 'Prophet Mani' articulated it, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, Star Wars repeated it.