The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

“Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”

future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.

I was feeling frightened.

Same

My brain cannot reliably report to me whether a perceived threat is really real, and so I look at Hank, and I see that he’s not panicked, and I tell myself that I’m okay.

I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don’t.

We’re the only part of the known universe that knows it’s in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We’re the only species that knows it has a temporal range.

Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986.

Very little of the future is predictable. That uncertainty terrifies me, just as it terrified those before me.

Of course, we still know almost nothing about what’s coming—neither for us as individuals nor for us as a species. Perhaps that’s why I find it so comforting that we do know when Halley will return, and that it will return, whether we are here to see it or not.

Armed Services Editions were paperback books that fit into a soldier’s pocket;

When the velociraptors turned the door handle, I heard my ten-year-old brother mutter, “Oh, shit.”

History is new. Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.

But the weird thing to me about velociraptors is that even though I know they were feathered scavengers about the size of a swan, when I imagine them, I can’t help but see the raptors of Jurassic Park.

but I found that it didn’t really work anymore, that whatever had once soothed me about this soft and silent creature no longer did. I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again, not really, which was the first time I can recall feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return.

As my daughter, then four years old, said when we visited the Hall of Presidents, “Those are NOT humans.”

The night feeling was my private name for the wave that crashed over me most school nights when I got into bed. My stomach would tighten and I’d feel the worry radiating out from my belly button. I’d never told anyone about the night feeling, and my heart was racing as I typed.

For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted—by new worries, or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered. My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks, churning and muddy and ceaseless. I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time—scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it.

“This looks photoshopped.” When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake.

It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you’ve been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That’s bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunsets five stars.

Piggly Wiggly.

When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the “just” of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.

One evening, just after the U.S.-led forces entered Baghdad, we were all watching the news on the couch together. Unedited footage was being broadcast from the city, and we watched as a cameraman panned across a home with a huge hole in one of its walls that was mostly covered by a piece of plywood. There was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spray paint on the plywood, and the reporter on the news was talking about the anger in the street, and the hatred. Hassan started to laugh. I asked him what was so funny, and he said, “The graffiti.” And I said, “What’s funny about it?” Hassan answered, “It says ‘Happy birthday, sir, despite the circumstances.’”

“What makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

I felt like I was nothing but a burden. My thoughts whorled and swirled. I couldn’t ever think straight. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or write. I was in daily therapy, and taking a new medication, but I felt certain it wouldn’t work, because I didn’t think the problem was chemical. I thought the problem was me, at my core. I was worthless, useless, helpless, hopeless. I was less and less each day.

They won’t be okay, of course, but they will go on, and the love you poured into them will go on.

“How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.”

“a photograph can’t help taming what it shows,” and I worry the same might be true of language.

He likes terrible, overly manufactured country music. He is alive. He calls his girlfriend his bae. Alive. Alive. Alive.

“Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.”

anyone who has ever been in pain knows how alone it can make you feel

As Elaine Scarry argues in her book The Body in Pain, physical pain doesn’t just evade language. It destroys language. When we are really hurting, after all, we can’t speak. We can only moan and cry.

I can only know my pain, and you can only know yours.

Sick days do not pass like well ones do, like water through cupped hands. Sick days last. When I had the headache, I felt certain I would have it forever. The pain of each moment was terrible, but what made me despair was the knowledge that in the next moment, and the next, the pain would still be there. The pain is so entire that you begin to believe it will never end, that it cannot possibly end.

I can hardly even remember what the headaches felt like. I remember that they were terrible, that they circumscribed my life, but I cannot return to my pain in any visceral or experiential way. Even though I myself had the pain, I can’t fully empathize with the me who had it, because now I am a different me, with different pangs and discomforts. I am grateful that my head doesn’t hurt, but not in the way I would have been grateful if, in the midst of the pain, it had suddenly disappeared. Maybe we forget so that we can go on.

In Ireland, a Franciscan friar named John Clyn described life as “waiting amid death for death to come.” Near the end of his plague journal, Clyn wrote, “So that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave [extra] parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Beneath that paragraph, a brief coda appears in different handwriting: “Here, it seems, the author died.”

But to grieve in a pandemic is to both grieve and fear.

That is a human story. It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them.

I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.”

THERE’S A KAVEH AKBAR POEM that begins, “it’s been January for months in both directions,” and it really has been.

wherein I spend most of the day psyching myself up to do one thing—visit a museum, perhaps—and the rest of the day recovering from the only event on my itinerary.

I sometimes feel like I can’t properly participate in conversation, because everything I say and hear has to drip through the sieve of my anxiety, and so by the time I understand what someone has just said to me and how I ought to respond, my laughter or whatever seems weirdly delayed. Knowing this will happen makes my anxiety worse, which in turn makes the problem worse.

But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and apathetic. I struggle to do anything. It’s hard to sleep, but it’s also hard not to.

She also said to me, “You’re going to be okay, you know. Not in the short run …” and then she paused before saying, “And also not in the long run, I guess. But in the medium run.”

When I asked my son afterward if he enjoyed the presentation, he paused for a moment before saying, “I want to say yes but I didn’t.”

The astonishing thing is that after scraping off the mold that became the world’s penicillin supply, the researchers ATE THE CANTALOUPE.

“These differences in life expectancy are not caused by genetics, biology, or culture. Health inequities are caused by poverty, racism, lack of medical care, and other social forces that influence health.”