Jan Morris’s great expectation

Jan Morris has spent 60 years traveling the globe, observing humanity and its works. But at 84, the travel writer is afraid she might not live to see the most interesting thing of all. “I have this strong feeling that we’re on the brink of some colossal change, some cataclysmic, indeed cosmic change,” she told John Walsh in the London Independent. “Look at the world in the last five years, the pace of change at every level. The technology, Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, is so astonishing, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.

I have reached the conclusion that what’s going to happen is...” She lets the dramatic tension build. “We’re going to discover, very soon, that we’re not alone in this universe.” Is she serious? “We’re going to discover there are sentient beings in the galaxy,” she confirms. “When it happens, the effects will be phenomenal. We’ll have to start again. And it’s going to happen, not in my lifetime, but in yours.” When she tells people this, Morris says, they think, “‘She’s bonkers, she’s gone off her head.’ But I haven’t. I believe in the sentient beings. But who they are, and where they are, that’s not my business.”

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