APPROACHING the end of the second decade of the 20th century, how far have we come from the first decade, 2000-2010? What was that first decade of our present century really like?

Five years on from 2014, might we not only recollect the central event of that year but something of the ethos in which we approached it?

Caught up as we are now in rolling news, 24/7, the disaster show online, immediate internet access to catastrophe, social media clouds all around us, with the narrowed vision of whatever it is our subscriptions endorse as our closed focus, let’s take it all back and travel in time to that earlier era. Where did it start? Where did it all go wrong?

In one of those essential, late-night conversations when the historian and poet Angus Calder visited me in New Zealand back in 1995, he said with wry wisdom that indeed, things do look different, “on this side of the Atlantic”.

We paused on that, and thought about exactly where we were.

When I went to see him in the nursing home a few days before his death in 2008, he smiled and said, “Well, Alan, what side of the Atlantic are we on now?”

Things look different depending on where you are: Westminster or Edinburgh, Oxford or Glasgow, on the islands of Unst or Matakana, in the cities of Wellington or Berlin, or Hamilton (New Zealand) or Hamilton (Lanarkshire). Things are not the same, and neither is time. We move through that dimension in different ways, at different speeds. Things were different when I was talking to Angus in 1995, and then in 2008.

And yet, as Angus’s words remind us, maybe what matters at the end of your life is something as local as a shared memory, a co-ordinate point to refer to, a sense of humour that allows for a quantum of dignity, even in the place of least.

In the first 10 years of the 21st century, the work of literature stayed true to these ancient priorities, despite all things that make the world horrifying and so full of grief.

Over the past five weeks in these columns Andrew McNeillie has been introducing us to poets and writers, film-makers and artists, isolated yet interconnected upon islands, from the Aran archipelago off the west coast of Ireland to the Shetland archipelago in the North Sea. Is there a single connecting reference for all of them, and us? Let’s begin with a co-ordinate point provided by Andrew in his poem “Cynefin Glossed”, from his book Slower (2006):

What is another language? Not just words
and rules you don’t know, but concepts too
for feelings and ideas you never knew,
or thought, to name; like a poem that floods
its lines with light, as in the fabled
origin of life, escaping paraphrase.
So living in that country always was
mysterious and never to be equalled.
For example, tell me in a word how
you’d express a sense of being that
embraces belonging here and now,
in the landscape of your birth and death,
its light and air, and past, at once, and what
cause you might have to give it breath?

This is a profound question about language and identity. While the poem confirms a vulnerable and precious desire, it is wise to leave its questions unanswered. The intense balances of cadence and tone, the meticulous rhythms, all are perfectly judged, and yet each line in that poem is plaintive, unexaggerated but poignant, confirmed by the universal human fact of loss, and haunted by a recognition of the unreturning world. It is intimate, inward, introspective, yet it has a universal application.

I think it’s worth pausing on that because it reminds us of the international context of all literature, and that has seemed to me to become increasingly emphatically necessary to keep in mind, as the 21st century has unrolled.

The first decade of the 21st century was marked from the start by the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, and the so-called “war on terror” that followed them, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. News programmes turned into war reports. The United Kingdom’s poet laureate Andrew Motion took an uncharacteristically tough line in his poem, “Causa Belli”:

They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad;
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.

The international success of the play Black Watch, written by Gregory Burke and staged by the newly formed National Theatre of Scotland (first performed 2006), brought the military world into sharp focus and fused it with pathos beyond the spectacle of warfare that already was becoming too familiar. The question of loyalty lay at its heart, and the word seemed more and more empty. One of the characters explains bitterly that it was not loyalty he felt for his country – neither Britain nor Scotland – nor to his regiment – but only to his mates. And when we see them die in the play, the waste of life is harrowing. The pathos is tangible and primary.

In a world where the gulf between rich and poor seemed to continue to grow more and more impassable, where climate change and environmental disaster was already looming and impinging, where celebrity culture had filled the western media to what seemed like saturation point, the work of literature stays a steely value, a reminder of things that really matter.

Yet the most phenomenal literary successes of the 21st century’s first decade were commercial, international and popular – or populist. What were the most famous “successes”? Surely, first, a series of books and films about a boy wizard in a boarding school, and then, perhaps less memorable now but almost equally phenomenally popular at that time, a thriller taking as its basic plot device a mystery at the heart of Christianity, culminating at Rosslyn Chapel, whose villains were religious fanatics and whose hero was a secular enquiring scholar. In those first 10 years of the century, an awful lot of people were reading JK Rowling and Dan Brown. And a lot of people were rereading Tolkien’s fantasy Lord of the Rings as Peter Jackson’s films of the books made cinema blockbuster history.

The National:

Yet fashion is a fickle guide. Perhaps the literary works that last in the memory are less famous, things that we really need much more, no matter how marginal they might have seemed at the time.

Such as Lloyd Jones’s 2006 novel Mister Pip, set on a remote island in the South Pacific, telling us how the value of literature is essential for survival, that storytelling is at the heart of being human, and offering continuities far more useful than the world sometimes encourages us to believe in. A sign of hope.

Hope was there, that we might find returning to light things that had been eclipsed for long enough, although perhaps some of us missed the verbal howlers that made the preceding “rawhide era” such a horrible entertainment, Mr Bush’s classic line, for example: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

The international provenance of good writing was confirmed by Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel Small Island, pinpointing 1948 as the turning point for Britain, a herald of the end of empire. And Kate Greville’s novels The Lieutenant and The Secret River, set in the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, span the world from Britain to Australia, rewriting history for a modern and contemporary readership.

MEANWHILE the indefatigable Iain Sinclair was annotating Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, describing the washed-out heart of darkness, once upon a time an Arcadian suburb of fine houses, orchards and conservatories, now a strange zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Reinvention as inner-city chaos, rife with crime and poverty, Sinclair’s dystopian visions recollect the American poet Edward Dorn (1929-99) glorying in the memory of the obsolete, glimpses of what had been “good”: “There are lots of good things that are obsolete. Kerosene lamps are obsolete, but there’s no light like it in a cabin in northern Wisconsin … Think of the best things in the world, actually, and they’re all obsolete. Sure. But that’s because a world that grows more and more venal and greedy and opportunistic makes things obsolete at a great rate ... So poetry is real obsolete ...”

And what some people considered obsolete political ideals broke back into vigorous life again when the Scottish National Party were voted into office in Scotland in 2007, precisely 300 years after the United Kingdom’s Treaty of Union. Their promise of a referendum on Scotland’s independence seemed to point clearly towards the possibility of the actual, rather than imagined, break-up and end of the British Empire, a prospect about which the fiction and literature noted above, and much else, was usefully thoughtful. And 2014 was still very much in the future.

Five years since that date, it’s worth thinking about what that first 21st-century decade meant, what might be retrieved from it. We’ll come back to this next week, with the appointment of Edwin Morgan as the first Scots Makar in 2004, but taking the wide survey, and starting with Angus Calder’s reminder of the virtues and liabilities of perspective, location and mortality, there are some things we can affirm already, deeply.

A certain forensic aesthetic is required, not as a solution, but, as in McNeillie’s poem, as a prompt for necessary questions. Maybe what that teaches us is that humane attachment should always be prized. Poetry, literature and the arts are a provision of sympathy, discerning, careful, beyond mere gathering of data.

Thus, now, towards the end of the century’s second decade, we know better than we did then that ecology is central to poetics.

And, as McNeillie reminded us over the last five weeks, how much there is still to learn from the literal sound and acoustics on islands, that differ from island to island, audible presences that can be sensitively evoked, songs that really matter to the ways that people live here, the things that make us what human beings are, wherever we are.

On whatever side of the Atlantic we will find ourselves, when the time comes.