Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

by Ben Ehrenreich

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time--"a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm" (Publishers Weekly).

Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time--the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.

In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present--unflinching, urgent--yet timeless and profound.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Essays, Environment, Memoir, Philosophy

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2020

About the author

Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. His fiction has been published in McSweeney's, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. In 2011 City Lights Publishers brought out his novel Ether.

Reviews

[Chris LaTray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had an ongoing love affair with the deserts of the American Southwest for nearly two decades now and I take my reading related to it both seriously and critically. With DESERT NOTEBOOKS, Ben Ehrenreich delivers a new contribution to the canon of essential reading about the place and the rest of the world as it relates to it.

Ehrenreich isn't writing a "desert book" per se, but he is writing from the Mojave, and his love for it is deep. As climate change flexes its dark might around him, and Donald Trump (named here as "The Rhino") wreaks his havoc, Ehrenreich delves into histories of the first inhabitants; the history of writing; philosophy, and ... owls. Sounds like a mash-up, and it is, but it works.

Sometimes journalists-turned-authors produce work that simply reads like a collection of reported pieces sewn together with a half-baked attempt at a narrative thread. Ehrenreich avoids that trap; this man is a storyteller. The mix of science, myth, anecdotes, and a profound love for the terrain produces one of my favorite reads of the spring thus far, if not the year.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Not at all what I hoped it would be. Hoped it would be ruminations on the grandeur or history or people of the desert, that might comfort and distract from 2020 news cycle and dreams of travel that can't happen. But this isn't that. It's more of a litany of world political and environmental problems I already know too well and memoir of hopelessness. Maybe it turns around partway through, but I'm not in a place where I should be that patient to find out.

[Jolanta (knygupė) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*

Pavadinimas labai tikslus - užrašų knygutė. Taip ir jautėsi, kad skaitai užrašus apie aplinkosaugą, klimato kaitą, gamtą, pasaulio pabaigas, mitologiją, šių dienų politines ir gamtines aktualijas, kurios tikrai kartais spekuliatyviai pritemptos prie reikiamų temų. Tokia savotiška mišrainė. Tačiau man ši knyga puikiai suėjo. Gal, kad labai pagarbiai ir dažnai buvo minimos mūsiškės Marijos Gimbutienės idėjos, gal, kad aprašomi mano pačios matomi vis dažnesni gaisrai Kalifornijoje, gal, kad stipriai jaučiama autoriaus meilė Mojave dykumai, augalams, gyvūnams, o gal tiesiog knyga pataikė į nuotaiką.

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this book because I love everything about the desert. Instead, all I got was the chaotic and random ravings and ruminations about everything that’s wrong with the world, without any new insight or constructive thinking. What a waste of time! I could just as well have listened to my stoned neighbor venting and repeating what everyone already knows!

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The time is out of joint,” Hamlet declares after he’s kicked out of a Zoom meeting.

Actually, he utters the famous line after a visit from his father’s ghost, but who among us hasn’t felt time slip during this pandemic? Days that go by in a flash …. Nights that drag endlessly on …. And why does the arrival of Thursday always feel like a shock?

In his timely new book, “Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time,” a hybrid memoir, travelogue and metaphysical inquiry, Ben Ehrenreich explores how our perception of time changes in a crisis — a crisis like climate change, or COVID-19.

“I think crisis, by interrupting the smooth flow of days, interrupting our expectations for the future, forces a different kind of time on us,” Ehrenreich said recently on a call from his home in Barcelona. “The linear flow is suddenly broken.”

It’s a feeling that Ehrenreich, a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, has experienced before. When he was in the West Bank reporting on the last Gaza war, the subject of his previous book, “The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine,” he developed the impression that time had “changed its shape … It was like there were pockets inside of time and pockets inside of those pockets. All the usual rhythms had been abandoned.”

That unease returned in the first few months of the Trump administration. Having recently moved to Joshua Tree, he was hiking in the national park with some friends, discussing the dire state of affairs, when they startled a pair of owls.

“They took to the air in a sudden rustling burst,” Ehrenreich writes in “Desert Notebooks.” Then the owls flew over the canyon walls and disappeared. This scenario repeated several times: the trio spotting the owls, the owls taking flight, the owls reappearing a little farther down the path.

Ehrenreich knew many cultures regard owls as messengers from the underworld. What message did these creatures carry for him, the country or the planet? Was it some kind of omen heralding the new dark ages?

“Desert Notebooks” might feel like an idiosyncratic book from a journalist, but his first two books were fiction with a speculative bent. Ehrenreich had hoped writing about the owls would help him go back to a third novel-in-progress. Instead, he began to investigate the implications of writing as the minute hand on the doomsday clock inched closer to midnight.

Once he started digging, Ehrenreich found he couldn’t stop. He fell into “a research hole,” studying Mayan mythology, European prehistory, the industrialization of the West, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, Walter Benjamin and more.

“Every avenue leads to a new avenue,” Ehrenreich said, “and you start making connections to all the things that you are thinking about. When it’s good, and I’m sure this is true of various psychotic forms of obsession, it feels like everything is connecting!”

In “Desert Notebooks,” Ehrenreich fuses the personal with the political in reflections on climate change, the president’s disaster du jour and his extensive reading in the desert.

“I didn’t want to write an abstract philosophical rumination on time,” he said, “because that’s not what I was thinking through. I was trying to figure out something precise that had to do with the times in which we live, with all the crises that had been present but were breaking out into visibility after Trump’s election.”

Though he moved on quickly from the owls, a feeling of foreboding circled the story. “The book needed, both in terms of the kind of impact that I want it to have but also what it’s about, this sense that we are on the precipice, that things are spiraling out, which is very much what pushed me to write it.”

The answers to many of Ehrenreich’s questions lay in the stars. That’s not to say he found an astrological explanation for why we’re suddenly eating ice cream for lunch, takeout for dinner and pancakes for second dinner. The desert allowed him to witness the wonder of the constellations — something he hadn’t experienced during all his years of living in light-polluted cities.

“Our understanding of what a story can be is incomplete,” Ehrenreich said, “because we can only think in terms of other words and other stories and not these celestial galaxies that people for almost all of human history have been relating themselves to.”

We no longer use the heavens to interpret time, and so our lives are linear — built around work calendars, sports seasons, fiscal years. When these organizing principles dissipate in a haze of Zooms and infection curves, is it any wonder we find ourselves asking, “Where did the day go?”

Ehrenreich, for one, knows where his time is going. He and his partner welcomed a baby girl in January, so it’s baby time all the time. And in spite of a pandemic that touches every corner of the world and civil unrest throughout the United States, he doesn’t fret quite as much over the future.

“The thing that causes the most despair is seeing all of these horrors as we march blindly toward our own destruction,” Ehrenreich said. “At least at the moment we don’t have the excuse that we’re marching blindly. People are making the connections that need to be made, putting their bodies and lives on the line to fight for a better world. That gives me hope.”

[fire_on_the_mountain · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you try to put this book in a box, you’re letting yourself down. Don’t do that.
Equal parts outdoors narrative, meditation on the nature of writing and communication, and analysis of our shifting conceptions of time throughout human history, this book lives the point that it tries to make: linear time is an artificial construct that serves one particular worldview, and in reality, the curvature of time brings us back around again and again. Naturally, this is difficult to grasp, as our entire conception of history and society is built upon the notion of ‘always forward progress,’ rooted in science and reason, itself rooted in capitalist rationality and control. It’s hard to unlearn that. You can start here if you’re open to it.
There were certain moments where I wasn’t certain where the author was going, and how we were going to get there (that linear thinking again!). I was never bored, but I was lost; but it was easy to get pulled along via digressions into the desert landscape that I love, and the narrative within a desert city. (The boundary between the urban and the frontier is illusory at best, and I appreciate his efforts to smash it further.) But my patience was fully rewarded by a final third that tied it all together.
When you’re ready for this book, it’s ready for you.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost fantastic, and on my list for a second read sometime down the road. Mr. Ehrenreich writes from and of two locales, Joshua Tree, and Las Vegas, with Las Vegas taking up the bulk of the book, but with Joshua Tree being the most cogent and interesting of the two. The leitmotif of the book is the author's relationship with owls, and they create the primary metaphors in both sections, though they get pretty short shift in the second, and seem to be brought back for the sake of cohesiveness more than importance. The notebook title is apt, as it's written as brief entries that wander through subjects and meditations. Reminded me a little bit of reading Eduardo Galleano - but just a little.

I found the Joshua Tree section to be an absolutely fascinating dip into desert ecology, the myth and metaphor of owls, the science of climate change, eschatology, and personal history. I was sure I had a five star book in my hands, but then came Vegas. Part Two wandered, and at times I felt I was reading various Wiki entries as the author laid out a lot of info without the glue of personal reflection that he gives in part one. For awhile, it became a slog, but I must say, when Mr. Ehrenreich writes nature description, and contrasts it with the day and nightmare of Las Vegas, he shines.

So a lot of stars, as in the night sky of Joshua Tree, but not Vegas, but a lukewarm review, and a desire to re-read, especially the first section because it was so good, and possibly the second to see if I'm off, and because there is good stuff there. Mixed, then, but...

So close...

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably wouldn’t have finished this book if it weren’t so beautifully written. Not that it is not interesting. But likely the last thing I needed during the waning days of the “Rhino” administration was to read about the end of the world as we know it, which, as a professional climate justice advocate, I am all too aware, and, as Ehrenreich writes it, maybe isn’t the worst thing in some ways.

Ehrenreich weaves current events, the destruction of indigenous cultures by European cultural supremacists, climate catastrophe, the beauty of the desert landscape and creation mythology with the social constructs of time, threading in his own experience as he’s writing the book.

There are new ideas here and some breathtaking passages. Even a little hope.

Four out of five stars because some of the passages get a little dry and academic.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

This impressionistic series of reflections orbits between two worlds – the desert and the city, mostly Las Vegas, and between the past, the present, and an ominous future. The desert will certainly be here at the “end of time”, but traces of Las Vegas will be as faint as some of the petroglyphs that Ehrenreich finds on walls of long-disappeared desert settlements.

The author tries to put the long history of humanity into a context, something he calls the “shape of time.” Time can be conceived of different ways, a line, an arrow, a circle, or a spiral, but Ehrenreich thinks a more useful way of thinking of time is as an expanding circle with “invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off” The present is what we see, a very limited vision, as evidenced by the desert, natural life, that is all around us. “Whatever you imagine is unique about yourself, whatever you think matters, the coyotes don’t care, the owls don’t care, and the stars most certainly don’t.” As a metaphor, the desert is eternal, it will go on, even if humans destroy most of the planet’s habitat.

What we see as unique is ephemeral and short sighted. Ehrenheit sees Las Vegas as a microcosm of a globalized casino economy gambling with the future, “a culture of pure and shiny spectacle, an empire built on buried murders and the adrenaline high of quick and brutal pleasures.” Some of the buried roots of this exploitative civilization can be found in the traces of the vanished cultures of the native Americans who lived in the southwest desert regions before the whites came .

The idea of progress is questioned, the kind of technological progress of Europe and the west. Historically, it was a Europe that put above all else an exclusive claim on “reason”, as if all other cultures were “primitive” and making slow movement toward reason. At the same time, it became amnesiac about the millions of people killed in wars, with mass killings and destruction becoming ever more methodical and efficient.

The author considers alternative ways of approaching reality, and they are a varied lot, based on Ehrenreich’s eclectic reading. If they have anything in common, it’s a poetic and intuitive way of perception that locates humanity as a small part of the whole. Jacob Boehme, a 16th century Christian mystic had obscure but compelling visions of God’s spirit whirling within whirling planets, all of it so swiftly that humanity can only catch glimpses. The language of nature is close to being the language of God. He relates native American creation myths with animals and nature intermingling with crafty intelligence, and includes the ‘popol vuh,” ancient Mayan myths of a harmonious existence.

He speculates on Hermetic pre-scientific thinking which combined insights of the Greek God, Hermes, and the Egyptian god, Thoth, the god of reckoning. Added to this mix is Paracelsus, the 15th century alchemist who attempted to incorporate natural substances into medicinal purposes. He concludes with a visit to Walter Benjamin’s grave. Benjamin, a Jewish 20th century thinker committed suicide rather than give himself up to the Nazis. In some of his later works he tried to reconcile an idea of progress with the chaos of the past.

All of this may seem like a random jumble, and there’s some truth to this. But I think Ehrenreich’s attempt is to search for alternatives to our destructive modern way of life. His attempt is not very successful, and it doesn’t lead to a lot of hope for humanity’s future. That’s not a reason to avoid the book, though – that humanity’s future is uncertain is obvious. Reading the book provides a kind of pleasure in seeing an alert and curious mind combining these diverse elements into the personal context of his daily life.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did you ever wish that you had a very wise and knowledgeable friend who was thoughtful, observant, and a good writer? Well, Ben Ehrenreich can be that friend through this book. Like Mr. Ehrenreich, I love Joshua Tree National Park and have been there several times. I admire the huge rock formations, the plants that mange to survive the desert conditions, and the open vastness of the landscape.

Mr. Ehrenreich inherited a love of the night sky from one of his grandfather's, and he is able to recognize the constellations that one can see from Joshua Tree. Moreover, he knows the history behind the naming of the constellations and also the mythological stories of the native Americans and compares those stories to the Greek and Roman myths.

In the first part of the book, he is living in rental property outside of Joshua Tree. He is an avid runner and describes what he sees in his runs into the desert. The second part of the book is about a writer's retreat in Las Vegas that he received through a university there.

But his book is more than about Joshua Tree and Las Vegas, it is about origin stories, history, our negative effect on the environment, and our mistreatment of the native peoples of the United States. Mr. Ehrenreich is very well read and his reading is along esoteric lines of his interests.

I haven't been to Las Vegas for years and reading about the commercialism and vast number of people who make their homes in the streets does not make it sound like an appealing place to visit.
This is an excellent read.

[Greg Bem · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Ehrenreich's writing is fantastic, and while the large swaths of historical information meets philosophy and existentialism in 2020 in a way that provokes intensely, the book as a whole doesn't exactly feel like a roadmap. It lacks a cohesive form and I often found myself wondering: what is going on here, and why should I care? Fortunately most of the book is set in the desert, so I could keep reading. Unfortunately much of the experience I felt absent, distanced, pulled away.

[Carly Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this more than I did. I did find the reflection about global climate change, politics, history, and more interesting. However, it was too long and wide-ranging for me.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

With regards to global warming I think we're all in a similar predicament to that of the average German when Hitler first rose to power. We're aware of the danger and now and again we witness something first hand which makes us apprehensive. But most of the time the thing of primary importance to us is the localised well-being of our own life.
This is one man's attempt to narrate how global warming affects the way he experiences the localised well-being of his own life. To begin with I enjoyed it. It read like a kind of doomsday blog. But it gradually became a little too repetitive and the tone a tad too sanctimonious for me. And getting back to my opening idea there's a sense in the depths of his being he cares more about the construction of his sentences than the weather outside. Neither did I find much food for thought in his biographies of various persecuted mystics who have advocated an alternative path to our western ideal of technological progress.

[Christie Bane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really, really disappointed in this book, simply because I thought it was about the desert and it wasn’t. I mean, small bits of it were, and those were the best parts. It started out with him walking through Joshua Tree and telling us about how a girl and her boyfriend disappeared there and were later found together in what was thought to be a murder-suicide to save them from painful starvation or thirsting to death after they got lost. I was like, “Yay, this is right up my alley!”

But then it wandered off into philosophy, and how we are ruining the Earth, and specifically what Donald Trump, who the author refers to as “the Rhino,” is doing to ruin everything in the world. I don’t disagree with any of this. We ARE ruining the Earth, and I loathe Donald Trump with every fiber of my being and agree that he is not dissimilar to an angry rhino rampaging around and breaking everything in his path. But after hundreds of pages, calling him the Rhino starts to grate on you, or at least on me. This became the kind of book where if my attention wandered for a few seconds of narration, I didn’t feel like it made one bit of difference, or even like I was always aware my mind had wandered at all.

Mostly I’m disappointed by the fact that I didn’t get a book about the desert. The descriptions of the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas were the best parts of the book, but they were too short to make up for the rest. And it’s really a shame, because he is a good writer and the narrator was great and this would’ve been a blissful experience for me IF ONLY it was all or even mostly about the desert.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Desert Notebooks is a hard book to describe. It’s a collection of Ehrenreich’s meditations and musings about humankind’s understanding of and relation to time and the concept of time’s ending, or the apocalyptic end of time. The chapters and sections are not really chapters or sections; they are compilations of many dozens of vignettes, anecdotes, or what I might call intensely focused little essays. Many of these compact pieces are profound, but just as many are lulling and brooding to the point of boredom in establishing a central memorable argument. Ehrenreich’s concern and passion for saving humanity and the environment are evident and to be commended throughout this oddly structured book where his attention on the desert is only an aspect of his focus. Ehrenreich also confronts the extensive and inexcusable damage Trump has done to the world, and I greatly agree with his condemnations of the imposter in the Oval Office, who Ehrenreich dubs “the Rhino,” which is apt because Trump does not deserve designation as president. I liked most, however, Ehrenreich’s observations about science such as the cosmic marvel of black holes, and I liked his reflections on the literary ingenuity of masterful minds like Borges, who is one of my favorite writers. However, the enchanting parts of Desert Notebooks do not make up for the many exhausting stretches where he reminisces in tangents about mythology, history, landscapes, and politics. Ehrenreich’s range and expanse of thoughts are quite amazing and engaging, but his thesis of wanting to illuminate a philosophy about the end of time lacks cohesion, leaving the book too scattered and elusive in making its point.

[ThereWillBeBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the better books I read all year. Dense subject matter is handled with the ease and lucidity of a friendly chat with a knowledgeable acquaintance. Eherenreich circles his themes like a hawk-or maybe an owl- and muses on the interconnectedness of history, astrology, mythology and contemporary culture in ways that can shake your core assumptions about the nature of time and our own place in the universe. Pretty trippy sounding, I know, but he eases you into the subject matter and it is all very comprehensible by the end.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When I did start writing, all I wanted was to remember the owls. I wanted to pin them down like any other memory…I wanted to be able to read back and remember what it had felt like: the uncanny beauty of their flight, those late-autumn flowers, the violet light of dusk. But they didn’t let me. They wouldn’t stop flying…I kept following them because I was trying to understand not just time but writing, too, and I realized time and writing are inseparable. Writing extends us in time… In any case, I couldn’t have known, but there it is: somehow I knew, and I felt happy. Some part of me understood, and didn’t know how to tell the rest of me. Sometimes time moves like that, not straight but sideways, backward even, and, like the owls, in silence, in broad and looping arcs.”

“For the inhabitants of the Great Plains of North America and the desert Southwest, where I now live, Armageddon would be slower to catch up. That apocalypse is always with us: all the joy that I take from this land has been contingent on the destruction of someone else’s world.”

A tour-de-force. A beautiful quixotic quest to understand and say what is happening in our lives and on our planet, the sublime and the subhuman. In the windchill of minus 19 my Colorado is enduring, I felt the desert alive on my skin, the night sky and stars blazing. I had an epiphany driving through Las Vegas a few years ago in the pouring, drenching, flooding rain, where I was marveling at all the masses of people, there to drink and gamble and escape life, and feeling smug and superior; but several times I hydroplaned and thought I was going to die, so I had to slow down until I was barely crawling, and I realized that what I do, wander around in the desert or mountains, drive longer distances than safe, hike alone, was the same.

I was tempting fate to escape the ordinary; gamblers get addicted perhaps because every time they throw the dice or bet a hand, they are hoping the universe or god will notice them and make them lucky; I do the same thing, risking my life, in a more cautious way than say, back country skiers or mountaineers on Everest, but in the same vein, to feel alive and chase a dream of a rainbow or the desert light on a river, or the red rock country glowing. I understood a piece of the human condition.

Anyways, the desert, and by extension, Las Vegas-esque examples of human made atrocities sparks epiphany after epiphany for me, so I understand this love letter to it and using it as base to explore time, writing, and our place in the world. My first exposure west of the Mississippi in my life was Las Vegas, flying out for a conference when I lived in New York, and looking down from the plane on red country changed my life. For the author it was owls, so he began by seeking out the stories humans create about owls and that led him on this chase. I was so happy to see him write later, that “of course, owls are not outcasts or omens or messengers. They’re birds. They see the world as birds do, and we don’t likely figure much in any of it.” If we get too caught up in history, which of course is not the whole story, just what has survived and what is from overwhelmingly white and male perspectives, we have an incomplete picture.

I do wish a poet had reviewed the book for him, and coaxed him to accentuate the beauty in it; his epilogue begins with the most hopeful of hopefulness quotes of Melville:
"Yet there is hope. Time and tide flow wide."

But much of the book is very negative, and while I can appreciate the gravity of the subjects (the era of the last president, climate change and disasters, the history of genocide of indigenous peoples, their creation myths about the beautiful hostile desert, and how we move forward,) he started this quest inspired by owls he encountered on a hike in a moment of spiritual transcendence which is intrinsically hopeful. So I would have left all as is, such important reporting on the state of the world, but tried to let the hope shine. An example is a comparison to the lights of Vegas as “radioactive algae,” a negative connotation; could he have thought of the more positive connotation of phosphorescent algae? Just simple threads that would have made the duality of the book stronger: the fine balance between hope and despair that Rohinton Mistry writes about and is our human condition if we are paying attention.

The indigenous stories are also of twisted and misogynistic views of the world, and I have to hope that many of them were twisted so by the despair of the genocide they were enduring; for example, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the beautiful story of Skywoman falling from the sky and then animals helping create land for her as an origin story; some of the tales the author relates have vaginas with thorns in them and the Coyote trickster acting in a satanic way, which also speaks of negative Christian influence. I understand the desert is a different place, so the stories around it are more harsh, but there is scholarship that misogyny was added later, so I would have appreciated a more balanced view as the ones included fit the negative story.

If you find poetry everywhere, as I do:

Now the wind is screaming
and all the creosote bushes
are thrashing about, rioting.
Sometimes at night
it sounds almost human,
keening in the dark,
drowning out the coyotes
and every other noise.
It can be unsettling, but hearing it a
nd beginning to understand it—
how the wind pushes the sand
and carves the rocks and shapes the land
over long millennia—has been one
of the joys of living here,
some awareness of those slow processes,
the intimacy of geologic time.
________________________________
I remember standing in front of the house and almost falling down
in a moment of dizzying comprehension, staring at the Milky Way
or the polestar and understanding with my body
as much as my mind where we were in the universe

and how and where we were moving. I felt like I’d been punched.
More than with any political or philosophical revelation,
the entirety of my perspective on existence—which,
despite all my convictions and everything I understood

in the abstract, was nonetheless centered on the earth,
and for the most part on this particular North American landmass,
and on this minuscule body and the tiny and petty radius
that extends from my eyes and thoughts and emotions—all of it shattered.
_______________________________
When I did start writing,
all I wanted was to remember
the owls. I wanted to pin them down
like any other memory…I wanted
to be able to read back and
remember what it had felt like:
the uncanny beauty of their flight,
those late-autumn flowers, the violet light of dusk.
But they didn’t let me.

They wouldn’t stop flying…
I kept following them because
I was trying to understand not just time
but writing, too, and I realized time and
writing are inseparable. Writing extends us in time…
In any case, I couldn’t have known, but
there it is: somehow I knew, and I felt happy.
Some part of me understood, and didn’t know how
to tell the rest of me. Sometimes time moves like that, not straight
but sideways, backward even, and, like the owls, in silence, in broad and looping arcs.
______________________________

The desert enforces its own perspective. It shrinks you and puts eternity in the foreground. If you’re open to it, and don’t mind a diminished role in this drama, it insists, quietly, on the surging beauty of all things and non-things living and dead and not-formally-alive.

If all clocks strive to represent—in various forms, with hands and digits and shadows and bells—the spinning of the earth on its axis, and calendars in their myriad forms represent the interactions of the earth with the sun and the moon and sometimes the rising and setting of the planets, could it make sense to suggest that the earth is also a clock? Just a bigger one, with a wider grip on time? And if the earth is a clock, why not the other planets? Why not Pluto? And what about the sun and the stars and the galaxies, the black holes at their centers, the clusters of galaxies and the larger bodies that they form, all the swirling stuff of the cosmos—what time does it tell?

Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is.

When I was nineteen I narrowly escaped from what was, until this fall, the deadliest wildfire in California history [in Oakland]…I could see flames crawling down the hillside. By the time we drove off, less than ten minutes later, smoke blocked the road in both directions. Everything was burning. The memories feel like a dream: we ditched the car and ran down the slope, flames spreading through the underbrush and licking the trees all around us. We made it to a clear stretch of road and caught a ride sitting on the trunk of someone else’s car. I went back with my godmother when the city at last let residents through the roadblocks to inspect what was left of their homes. Only her chimney was left. The car, reduced to skeletal essentials, was hundreds of feet from the spot where we had abandoned it [to run.]
…
In November fires erased the town of Paradise, California, killing eighty-eight people, more than tripling the grim record for fatalities set by the Oakland hills fire that I survived seventeen years earlier. If [Louis Auguiste] Blanqui is right I’m still running from it, my scrappy, nineteen-year-old self racing down that burning hillside in universe after universe. Somewhere else out there I don’t make it. Somewhere else California never burns.

It’s a lot to take in at once, this web, and in our dizziness and fear that its limitlessness adds up to meaninglessness we can’t help but hack a story out of it, following a single path from node to node and ignoring and excluding all the other links. That’s what we do. That’s what I’ve done…And that beyond any individual route or routes, there is the map itself, this sprawling connectedness without terminus or border. It tells a different kind of story, and presents a different kind of choice.

Empires do not go down quietly. Usually they take the whole world with them for a while. The unconscious won’t stay un. And into this cauldron the hurricanes and fires blow, one after another…The carbon that had for millennia slept beneath the planet’s crust in vast and oozy subterranean cemeteries was suddenly spat into the air through smokestacks, chimneys, exhaust pipes. It stayed up there and commenced absorbing more and more of the radiant heat of the sun, causing the earth to precipitously warm, the ice at its poles to melt, its oceans to rise, their currents to shift. You are no doubt by now familiar with this process. What is it, really, though, but a haunting— —the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?

In 2014 I was living in Ramallah…Then the war started. Too much was happening, all of it bad. Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.

It was getting harder, we agreed, to muster faith in any of it, to care at all about lit[erature]-world battles that had once seemed so important. No matter how pointless things may have felt at any given moment, A. said, you could always tell yourself that you were taking part in a conversation, an exchange that stretched back into the immeasurable past and on into a future that you couldn’t yet imagine. That was the conceit. Not progress but continuity, at least. You could tell yourself that it was the conversation that mattered, this stream of voices flowing through the centuries, this ancient, almost sacred thing that is bigger and deeper than any of us alone.

To fight against that notion of time, I would have to understand how it came to be shaped the way it is, and why we experience it as we do. I would have to ask what histories had to be erased and what new narratives invented for time to rule our lives this way. To figure out, if I could, how those omissions and accretions led us to precisely this perilous moment, in which everything, time included, appears to be on the verge of collapse.

To know where the stars are is to know what time it is, what day and what year. Time is not an independent vector that pushes on, stubborn and cocksure, taking us to a place called the future. It lives in our bodies and in the stars, in the mountains that rise up from the sea floors, in the wind and rain that wash the mountains back into the sea. Everything moves. Mountains and oceans as well as stars.

Could it be, then, that we owe our understanding of time—dull time, that we wear like a leash, the time that’s always running out, that drags us toward the grave and that we yet never have enough of, empty, fragmented, insulting, oppressive, insufferable time, blinking away on our iPhones, measurable on a management consultant’s spreadsheet—not just to ancient wounds and the demands of capital and conquest, but also to the undimmed ecstasies of two-thousand-year-old Egyptian gnostics convinced that “Eternity is the Power of God,” that nothing ever begins or ends, and that, in Yates’s paraphrasing, “in this divine and living world, nothing can die and everything moves”? Can even time in all its vastness contain such contradictions? Where, in the substance of a moment, would they fit?

[Litbitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an original piece - a combination of personal essay, environmental reporting, log of the dull horrors of the Trump years, and cultural history.

I was particularly taken with his personal journey - the way that Ehrenreich relates to the goings on in the world, his environment, the people he stumbles across and those he loves - and the philosophical writings on our Western relationship (or lack thereof) with nature, false or destructive "civilization," the ways in which we see ourselves and our roles in contrast to indigenous cultures and the train to which our obsession with progress has strapped us: one heading towards 3 degrees of global warming and the whiplash-inducing environmental destruction we have inflicted on ourselves.

I wasn't taken much with the elaborate ancient myths around twins and murdering relations, but really enjoyed the rest of it - the observation and the theory.

[Jonathan Lerdau · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s the kind of book where the author has clearly read everything every written and can talk intelligently about all of it, which is a genre I really like. that being said, I don’t think the authors actual thesis was that smart or interesting. However I learned a lot

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book begins with a walk in a desert wash, and an owl. It ends much the same way. But in between is a vast exploration of time, of myth, of change, of place, of faith, of history, of life. The owl and deserts, as well as the nature of time, are themes throughout.

I loved this book. It does feel like a writer's notebook, with sometimes very short (two-sentence) sections of description or musing, sometimes longer mini-essays on a larger topic. As such, it constantly changes course, taking the reader in new, and always fascinating directions. There is Lilith of the Bible, the creation tale of the K'iche' Maya, the Ghost Dance, rock art; there is also present-day politics, the climate crisis, Palestine, and Las Vegas. And so much more. It's impossible to summarize, except to say it's a deep meditation on what it is to be alive in the America of today. In that regard, it is not especially optimistic. We are not living in a pretty time. But more than that, it is a meditation on lived experience, how we interact with the world.

I flagged many, many passages. Here are two as a sampling. The first describes Ehrenreich's perception of time while living in war-torn Ramallah in 2014:

Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.
 I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I've felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino's [Trump's] election. I don't know what to call it. The time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears to fall apart.

I would say this is even more true of life in the time of Covid-19, which hadn't hit yet when he wrote this book. Though yes, it was bad enough simply with Trump at the helm and things otherwise "as usual."

And here's a bit on the Mesopotamian understanding of the universe, pasted onto the present day:

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read. Which means there could be no line between the reader and the written. You, who are reading this, you too are written, you too can be read. And I, a writer, am already written through and through. Everything between us, everything that separates us, mountains, stars, years, shimmering thoughts and dreams that die with waking, all of it is a single chain of signs that do not point to another reality, only to this one, all at once.

I could quote more, but as I said: it's difficult to pin this book down. So I'll leave it at that. Like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, I could definitely see reading this book all over again and finding it just as stimulating.

I looked at Goodreads to see what people thought, and most people either loved it (*****) or hated it (*), in the latter case because the author, in the very first sentence, calls Trump “the Rhino” (appropriately, if you ask me)—those folks simply objected to the name-calling, never mind what was actually in the book—or else because the book isn’t really about the desert in all its glory. That’s exactly what I liked about it, though: the book is about the desert and so much more, and it’s about our present moment, which is awful in so many ways, and yet time marches, spirals, wings us into an other time, inevitably. This won’t last forever. With any grace from the gods, it won’t last more than two more months. But yes, we’ve made it through awful times before, and we’ll do it again. Even as we keep on changing the planet. And that, too, has happened before, over and over. Nothing new under the sun. But that said, this present moment is in itself something of a miracle. Both at once. Ain't it amazing?

[Eugenie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the author's ruminations upon his hikes in the desert in Joshua Tree National Park and how he brought in mythologies from many different traditions to reflect about the changing climate and the meaning of time. The author brought in so many different ideas that I sometimes wasn't sure where he was going with them. I will have to reread parts of this book. I would recommend this book to those who love the natural world.

[Jeimy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not think I would enjoy this book when I first picked it up. It did not seem cohesive. It seemed to be made up of ruminations inspired by the desert and the encounters the author had there. Ultimately, I started to appreciate the book as a tapestry with threads about the authors experiences with the natural world, threads about literature and writing, and threads about politics where the 45th president of the United States appears as a rhino to create a bigger picture about climate change and where we are headed.

[Brown Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it was certainly not Ehrenreich's intention in writing it, this is the last book I ever read. It is powerful magic, this assay of the instruments of our demise. Is writing the seed of our destruction? Can knowledge exceed the fight in our souls? Is there dignity in struggle? Shall we succumb, or only relent? Are owls the augur of our extinction? Is cruelty our species' default setting, or a survival strategy?

Damn, what a book!

[Erin McMahon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let me start by saying I hope the author never reads this review. With that disclaimer, this was a bad book. It was painful to read and I had to drag myself through it. Not only was it boring, but it jumped all over the place with the seeming only continuity being owls and endings. I wanted the book to end ahout 200 pages before it did. The historical references were dry and the personal anecdotes were oddly specific. Overall, would not recommend.

[Karen Swiech · Rating 2 out of 5]

First off: DNF. Secondly, while his writing proves the author’s erudition, it wasn’t exactly emotional, which was odd since it really seemed as though he has deep feelings, at least for the desert. And thirdly, I got tired of having the president called the RINO in the WH.

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I though this was so entertaining and absolutely right on with the current time. Will be one of my favorite and definitely goes on the christmas list for friends.

[Maiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll never think of owls in the same way again

[Ezekiel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's as meandering as the title suggests, although the controlling metaphors (images/symbols, really) of owl and ancient myths, and the more modern one of our current civilization's seemingly infinite progress, help tie all the stray observations together. However, the book really hits its high in Chapter 7, with Ehrenreich's grappling with the work of Jakob Boehme. His attendant descriptions of Las Vegas, there, take on a curious (almost sublime) resonance with the previous insights. And it is a relatively breezy read from that point on.

[Mihai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some interesting reflections on time, myth and nature. I really enjoyed learning about the Popol Vuh, among many ancient sources of wisdom, and the stories of various indigenous communities. Abundant references to literary and philosophical sources also contributed solidly. The parts about the impending end of the world due to climate change are too doom and gloom.

[Kadie Britt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I imagine this book isn’t for everyone. It was unique, telling multiple stories at once. I loved it and consider it a favorite. I have a deep love for the desert and enjoyed the journey of all that was in this book.