The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“‘For years, you read all the articles,’ Wehage told me recently, over the phone. ‘You look at pictures of the pollution, you think about the greed that fuels it, and you feel upset. But then, when you’re there, you understand that it’s so much worse than anything you could read.’”

— Chris Wehage, to Jia Tolentino / “What to Do with Climate Emotions” / The New Yorker

“I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying”

— W.S. Merwin / “For A Coming Extinction”

“The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today. It is hard work for us to remember that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like we are forever: burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coalmine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our collective fantasies of perpetual growth, constant innovation, and endless energy, just as the reality of individual mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.”

— Roy Scranton / How to Die in the Anthropocene

“Even if they survived — even if they could be perpetuated indefinitely in laboratories and zoos — their extinction would already be in progress. Like a neurodegenerative disease, extinction was a slow hollowing, not a sharp cut. The death of the last holdout was in some sense a mere formality.”

— Ned Beauman / Venomous Lumpsuckers

“I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I’ve known in life I don’t know what I’d do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.”

— Cormac McCarthy / The Sunset Limited

“in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure of my escape.”

— Charles Bukowski / “old man, dead in a room”

“The luxury I had of pondering my emotions at length was evidence of how much closer I was to the problem than to the solution: climate change’s worst effects will always fall on the poor and disenfranchised, both locally and globally, and in this context it was hard to believe that the project of teaching the world’s most fortunate people how to feel was more than another form of self-absorption.”

— Jia Tolentino / “What to Do with Climate Emotions” / The New Yorker

What I’m Listening To:

“Onward
Buffalo
Alone
Onward, no herd, I heard
You killed them”

— Being Dead / “Last Living Buffalo”