Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller My writing desk is a tavern table that once saw service in an 18th-century inn. When I look up, the waved and bubbled window panes of my study offer a view that has changed very little in the 200 years since the glass was set in place. A small paddock rises gently to an apple orchard. At this time of year boughs of unfurling, oak leaves hide the black slash of electric wires. And that’s helpful; for every morning, after I turn off the urgent chatter of news radio — its breathless headlines and daunting traffic reports — I make my way up to this little room and attempt to leave my own time behind. For most of 1999, I tried to live in 1666. I wanted to imagine what it was like to be a young woman in a tiny English village of250 souls in the year bubonic plague struck. My novel is based on what took place in a real village named Eyam in the Pennine mountains. I stumbled upon Eyam by chance one summer day, hiking with my husband through the picturesque countryside of Derbyshire. Inside the village church, a display told of how the villagers had decided to quarantine themselves to arrest the plague’s spread. I found the story moving, but I don’t think I would have tried to write a novel about it if we hadn’t come to live a few years later in a tiny village of 250 souls in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. You live differently in a small place. I had been a city person all my life: my homes had been in the dense urban tangles of Sydney, New York, Cairo and London. Though each of those cities is very different, I was much the same in all of them. People say cities breed acceptance of diversity, but I didn’t learn that lesson there. It took a village to teach me tolerance and a measure of tact. If you meet a person who lives near you in a big city and you don’t like her, that’s fine: you can conduct your life so that you never have to speak with that person again. But in a village of 250, you don’t have that luxury. You will see each other, the day following day. You will sit side by side at town meetings or at other people’s dinner tables. You’re stuck with each other. At first, I disliked this. Used to choose my friends for their like minds and agreeable opinions, I found it hard to be thrust into relationships, but in time I learned that it wasn’t necessary to always speak to someone about the things on which we disagreed. Within a year or two I was surprised that several of the folk I’d disliked on the first meeting had somehow turned into valued friends. Lessons about rage, passion and tolerance made me think of plague-stricken Eyam: how extraordinary it must have been to bring a community to a decision as dramatic as quarantining itself to keep infection within village bounds. And how horrible it is to find that as a consequence of your sacrifice two out of three of your neighbours were dead within a year. How would any kind of social order, faith or relationship survive? It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy. By GERALDINE BROOKS 2 July 2001 Analyze the writers’ use of contrast in this feature article. Write 200 words