What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

It beggared belief that we, a free people, citizens of a democracy, had failed to stop them, had failed to stand up to these men and their political enablers working so assiduously at climate change denial. And to think that these same people had already reaped profits of billions, making them some of the richest people ever to have lived. But when the most powerful nation in the world took their side, swaggered to the very forefront of denial, what hope did Planet Earth have. To think that the masses of refugees fleeing shortages of food and clean water caused by global ecological disaster would find compassion anywhere their desperation drove them was absurd, the man said. On the contrary, we would soon see man’s inhumanity to man on a scale like nothing that had ever been seen before.

Neither season after season of extreme weather events nor the risk of extinction for a million animal species around the world could push environmental destruction to the top of our country’s list of concerns. And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were, equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real, do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.) Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely preventative action, but rather a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.

she would feel a sort of ache for the old man she herself was going to end up with one far-off day. That man, as she saw him, though bereft of youth, would still have certain essential things. To begin with, thanks to a long and successful career, he’d have plenty of money to live on. He’d have a good heart, and in spite of the frailties of old age, he’d have his dignity. (It goes without saying he’d have all his marbles.) He and she would live a quiet but stimulating life together, a rich, elegant life, as she saw it: going to concerts and plays and movies, and traveling abroad, though never as part of any god-awful retirees’ group tour please.

Was it really possible that Americans would elect to the highest office in the land, to the most powerful position on earth, a person so manifestly unfit, so brazenly immoral and corrupt, a person who lied with every breath and was a complete incompetent to boot?

Like the extinction of life on earth as a result of nuclear war or climate change, an afterlife that includes the possibility of never-ending fear and pain appears to be a horror too vast to be assimilable.