In a story with lots of little tragic moments throughout, one thing that always hits me are the male channelers who exiled themselves to the Steddings during the breaking of the world.
It was noble and brave (they needed to remove themselves before they went mad to protect their loved ones and to keep themselves from contributing to the breaking). But one by one they left the Steddings. I think this was probably a really complicated thing that was probably both brave and selfish.
Brave, because they weren’t mad (yet), and maybe they could do something about the terrible things happening. Some, if not all, were Aes Sedai who probably felt a professional as well as moral responsibility to *do something* for humanity. Maybe the madness was gone. Maybe, somehow, it wouldn’t affect *them*. Maybe they could be the one to reverse it. And they couldn’t do any of that from the Stedding. How could they just watch the breaking and not at least try?
Selfish because in the Stedding they are cut off from the One Power and that causes it’s own set of problems. It’s addictive. Is it really living, once you’ve used it, to never use it again? Even if it means going mad in the end? But also they would have been lonely and isolated in the Stedding. Even with Ogier and each other, and maybe some brought families, exile and quarantine are hard to bear forever.
There is still debate three thousand years later—was this good, because if all the male channelers had been out at once maybe the world and Pattern would have just ended; or did it just prolong the Breaking and drag the agony out?
I think it resonates with our experiences with the pandemic. Was it better to “flatten the curve,” or did that just drag it out and should we have just let it rip? Or would letting the virus run unchecked have been too devastating for our society (moreso than it already was)? We all had to deal with quarantine and lock down, and for some this was horribly isolating and painful. It may have been the right thing to do, but it came with it’s own consequences.
How long could any of us have lasted in the Stedding, under those circumstances?
(To be clear, I’m a doctor who took care of covid patients and still does—we barely managed to not collapse our hospital system with the approaches taken. Vaccines work, social distancing and masks worked, and covid kills people. But the global experience of lock down, quarantining, and the isolation it produced are all very real too.)
