The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

Elwood offered me a kind of hope that wasn’t bullshit, and in doing so helped me to see that hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness. Hope is not easy or cheap. It is true. As Emily Dickinson put it, “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all

Now, more than ever, watch Harvey.

But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

many also had no idea why they were fighting and dying for tiny patches of ground so far from home. In the British trenches, soldiers began to sing the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with different words: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

We live in hope—that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. I give auld lang syne five stars.

Sarah said, “So, what do you think of Indianapolis?” And then the guy standing behind the counter at the U-Haul place paused for a moment before saying, “Well, you gotta live somewhere.”

Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Home ownership was all maintenance. There

Toward the end of his life, he answered an interviewer’s question by saying, “I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or some place like that. It’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.”

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

you’ve seen mile after mile of cornfields. Amber waves of grain are enshrined in the song “America the Beautiful.” But more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined.

To minimize weeds and make our lawns as thickly monocultured as possible, Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields.

As a spectator sport, the 500 leaves much to be desired. No matter where you sit or stand, you can’t see the entire track,

The largest crowd to watch a sporting event every year cannot see most of the sporting event.

Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then becomes distressingly fast at the end. Like life, people find meaning in its outcomes even though the game is rigged toward the rich and privileged, and insofar as it isn’t rigged, it’s random. And like life, your friends get mad if you take their money, and then no matter how rich you are, there’s an ever-expanding void inside of you that money can never fill,

Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing.

“The pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”

thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One

engrossed. I think engrossed is what I really want to feel most of the time. It’s such an ugly word, “engrossed,” for such an absolutely beatific experience.

“I feel calm when I’m drawing,” Doi has said, and although I’m no artist, I know what he means. On the other side of monotony lies a flow state, a way of being that is just being, a present tense that actually feels present.

our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.

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.

“Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning.” The virus that spread through my spinal fluid had no meaning; it did not replicate to teach me a lesson,

the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor nations was its eradication in rich ones.”

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.”

KAVEH AKBAR POEM that begins, “it’s been January for months in both directions,”

I love Indianapolis precisely because it isn’t easy to love. You have to stay here a while to know its beauty.

endowing nature with emotion “is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively a weak one.”

As e. e. cummings put it, “the snow doesn’t give a soft white / damn Whom it touches.” And yes, how grateful we are to the modernists

But we give a soft white damn whom snow touches.

narrator who feels as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the hole. I’m the vice president of panic, and the president is missing. In

I don’t believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go.

it was only the hangover talking, but the hangover does talk rather loudly.

the way to avoid hell was “to keep in good health and not die.”

“No bright line between imagination and memory.”

Mountain Goats. Their song “Jenny”

“And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon / We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have His eyes on.”

A while back, my brain started playing a game similar to the why game. This one is called What’s Even the Point.

Edna St. Vincent Millay poem

“That chill is in the air,” the poem begins, “Which the wise know well, and have even learned to bear. / This joy, I know, / Will soon be under snow.”

art, which is just using the finite resources of our planet to decorate.

gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that

love, which is just a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never truly solve for,

that he looks into the future and sees only “this big blank space where I should be.” When I think of the future, I start to only see the big blank space, the whyless bright terror. As for the present, it hurts. Everything hurts. The pain ripples beneath my skin, bone-shocking. What’s the point of all this pain and yearning?

Despair isn’t very productive.

Depression is exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying.

“Believe! Be live! What a word!”

believe comes from Proto-Germanic roots meaning “to hold dear” or “to care.”

But for now I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.

the Palace Music song “New Partner”

Palace Music is one of the many incarnations of Will Oldham, who sometimes records under his own name and sometimes as the dandyish Bonnie Prince Billy.