What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

The subject was climate change, the mild term by which it was still known.

They prefer things that are new, like the latest toys and novelties of Nigerian pop culture.

The Blundys and their guests lived in what we would regard as a paradise. There were more flowers, trees, insects, birds and mammals in the wild, though all were beginning to vanish. The wines the Blundys’ visitors drank were superior to ours, their food was certainly more delicious and varied and came from all over the world.

M. Hollande,

From what I’d heard, as soon as these passengers landed in America they would need to pay for the protection of a local warlord. The politics were complicated.

What brilliant invention and bone-headed greed. What music, what tasteless art, what wild breaks and sense of humour: people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday; buildings that touched the cloud base; razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their backsides. But they also spelled out the human genome, invented the internet, made a start on AI and placed a beautiful golden telescope a million miles out in space. Then, of course, hardly worth repeating, they watched amazed as the decades sped by and the Derangement gathered pace, the weapons proliferated and they did little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed. Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike.

In my teens I became absorbed in the poetry of Wordsworth, the notebooks of his sister Dorothy and their youthful friendship with Coleridge. I was in love with simple Dove Cottage. They became mine, those 900 square miles of mountains and lakes, those ‘rocks, and stones, and trees’. Submerged long ago, they remain a familiar terrain, boundlessly free, one that I can almost convince myself I remember.

I was transported back there, I would loathe it. The stupidity and waste would suffocate me or make me insane. So would the nastiness of social media, then run for profit rather than as a public service. What, she demanded, of the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders – take your pick – and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations? What of the people’s careless love of autocrats? How could we overlook or forgive the desolation those times bequeathed, the poisons they left in the oceans, the forests they stole, the soils and rivers they ruined and the Derangement they acknowledged but would not prevent? It was all scorched earth, all blithe contempt for the generations to follow. The world I hankered after was a privileged corner – Gloucestershire! The big world beyond was sinking.

What came now was not the nuclear winter that scientists had once predicted, for this was not an all-out global exchange. In five years, average global temperatures dropped by almost two degrees and did not rise for many years.

This was because of a catastrophic distraction, the Inundation of 2042.

The long-predicted war between Russia and the West began with yet another pre-emptive strike, this one aimed most likely at US military installations in New Mexico. Faulty engineering caused the missile to drop 4,000 miles short. The outsized hydrogen bomb hurled seventy-metre-high waves towards Europe, West Africa and North America. Too deadly to be the accident the Russian authorities claimed? That question was never resolved. There were only a few hours of warning.

Against all expectations, within twenty years of the Inundation,

2062

By then, the destruction of the biosphere was beyond the worst of earlier fears.

Unrestrained corporations, reluctant governments, poverty and armed struggle made the early twenty-first century look species-rich.

Compressed diction, challenging imagery, the ‘artful braiding within its pentameters of iambs and trochees’ – H. Kitchener – and all the other demands of serious poetry would ensure the Corona’s death before a larger public.

That period of ‘Climate Opportunity’ and ecological longing lasted no more than thirty years. The long-delayed Third Sino-American War broke out as the inevitable overspill of the Pacific chaos. Though ‘contained’ by improved AI to conventional exchanges, many famous cities were turned to ashes. Worldwide disease, famine, drought, unprecedented mass migrations – no one had time for poetry or any other cultural endeavour. Survival was the only dream, which many did not fulfil. Between then and now, our numbers fell from nine to four billion,

I was born the year population rolled over to four billion- spring 1974

In written form, guidance can run to half a dozen single-spaced pages and is, I think, sensible and robust, though I know that others disagree. The tone is comradely. A response to an anxious question from a nineteen-year-old might begin, ‘I believe she’s trying to tell you something here and I’d say it’s time for you to be more reflective and analytical about your own behaviour. Remember the trouble you were in last year.’ NAI knows about a respondent’s life in intimate detail and its memory, of course, is long. The kids like that. They feel important, known and cared for. They are proud of an accumulating dossier that tells of their escapades, successes, disasters and growth.

I wish to God we had this at work for the kids.

Our various forms of disaster and chaos have blocked the development of better machines and software. No gallium and germanium or even copper in the Surrey Hills!

I challenged Lars to derive a lesson for humanity from the funicular’s ingenious machinery. He pointed through the window at the track up ahead. We were about to pass the descending carriage. ‘An optimist’s charter: we see our same old mistakes coming at us again, but their weight will see us to the top.’

I was almost forty-five, a time when maturity and accumulated knowledge intersect with the last of youth’s lingering strength and quickness of mind.

Ugh. No truer words have ever been written!

An entire chapter was devoted to sunbathing. From the 1970s onwards, millions of white British travelled south in summer by cheap flights to spend hours each day spreadeagled by swimming pools and on beaches beneath a ferocious sun. The purpose was to turn white skin brown, which was considered a healthy and attractive look. That this idea coexisted with white racism was, the author suggested, one of the fascinating enigmas of social history. Even when medical science established the cancerous and ageing effects of excess exposure to sunlight, the practice continued well into the twenty-first century. With the tragedies of the Derangement, the Inundation and much else, the population plummeted. As systems broke down, international trade and travel became difficult. Chaos spread and the population continued to decline.

Against all demographic predictions, inter-racial marriage increased to the extent that within a mere three or four generations, the descendants of many whites have realised the old sunbathers’ dream. However disastrous our condition, one much-quoted commentator insisted, ‘out of adversity, we are honey, we are golden’.

A wider gene pool improved general health, though radiation from the wars pushed in the opposite direction. Completely white people have become a substantial minority. It i...

When I was a child, I used to imagine that the past existed somewhere other than in people’s heads. All that happiness and sorrow, those jokes, battles, holidays and people could not simply disappear. Surely, the past lingered in a hidden dimension by its place of origin. The walls of a room were altered, I suspected, by everything that had happened between them. I knew the sensible grown-up response – the present vanished forever into the gaping mouth of the greedy past.

When 2.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels was recorded, early in the twenty-second century, no one was surprised.

had started keeping a journal soon after seeing my future husband playing in his jazz band in the Cowley pub. My entries were never regular, and I often had to force myself to write them. I tried to keep going because, like Francis, I believed that most of life is oblivion.

Like most people who talk in private to themselves on the page, my loyalties were to the truth as I understood it at the time.

In addition, guilt and remorse are useful aids to memory.

To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small. I fairly bounced up the gangway.

‘Just hear me out. To do what I do, I need to be alone. I know I’ve neglected you. I wanted to make amends with a poem. As for the climate stuff, if that’s relevant, you know my views. This is clearly not me in the poem and therefore it’s not you. It’s not a portrait of our marriage, it’s not about me or you. It’s for you. It speaks for your interests and concerns, not mine. It’s a gift, as simple as that.’ ‘It’s a confession. I didn’t ask to be implicated.’

But I also hated him, and not only for what he did with a mallet. He was a thief. I’d not been able to say it to him because I might have choked up when I uttered Percy’s name. For his poem, Francis stole my best, most precious times with Percy, inserted himself into our carefree wandering across rich landscapes, into our joy in nature and passion for naming it, into our curiosity, our delight in river-swimming, our rough picnics in meadows and woods. To give his poem force, Francis crept inside Percy’s skin. If I once loved Francis to a degree, I loved and still love Percy far more. I don’t know how I can forgive a poem that ritually enacts a murder by which Francis tries to replace Percy.

but there are occasions when prose must eclipse poetry.

I remembered my luck in being alive, in simply being. So easy, not to have existed, so easy to forget in the fine detail of daily life, and vital to recall from time to time.