Even if humans survive global warming, the next proverbial flood will almost certainly end our short reign on this planet. It could be a lethal virus, a drought, an ice age, a volcanic eruption. Perhaps resource scarcity will spark a final war.
At some point, if not on our first try, we will get death right.
And then our planet will orbit unintelligently for the rest of time, an unintelligent rock among unintelligent rocks in an unintelligent universe. The brief experiment with human consciousness—with learning words, planting seeds, sizing the space between monkey bars, twisting loose teeth, trick-or-treating with pillowcases, sliding pencils under casts, making stovepipe hats and beards from construction paper, folding cranes, planting flags, folding poker hands, sharing selfies, wrestling down jealousy, raising pylons to bring electricity to remote communities, raising pylons for beautiful bridges, rowing sailboats in the doldrums, lowering flags to half-mast, struggling to refold maps, sizing engagement rings, launching telescopes to see ever farther into the past, cutting umbilical cords, amortizing, testing the heat of milk against wrists, re-shingling roofs, making way for ambulances, racing hurricanes, preparing wills, misremembering childhood homes, choosing cancer treatments, crumpling inadequate eulogies, setting clocks a few minutes fast to fool oneself, turning off lights to save electricity or a free way of life—will be forever unremembered.
Or perhaps there will be life after us. And perhaps the next inhabitants of what once was our home will arrive soon enough after our disappearance to find artifacts of our tenure: fragments of stone constructions, pieces of plastic, unusual distributions of silicon. Perhaps they will find human handprints left in a cave in southern Argentina, which date to 7300 B.C.E., and human footprints on the moon, and assume that these were equally primitive expressions, or equally sophisticated. Perhaps they will arrange our remains in a museum, accompanied by texts hypothesizing our intentions and what it was like to be human:
They preferred groups, as small as two. They consumed food when not hungry, engaged in non-procreative sexual activity, and acquired superfluous possessions and knowledge. They struggled with hydration and gravity. They recorded experience with writing implements that disappeared with use. Their hair usually changed color, but their eyes usually did not. They brought their hands together to express approval, and even nonbelievers concealed their feet. They lifted heavy objects, rearranged their teeth. The living needed distance from the dead, but the dead needed proximity to one another. They had names, although very few had unique names. They had numerous languages and systems of measurement, but no universal language or system of measurement. They paid strangers to touch their backs. They were drawn to chairs, helpless things, privacy and exposure (but nothing in between), reflective minerals, rectangular pieces of glass, organized violence. Each group selected members to worship. They struggled to remain conscious in the dark. They had no armor plating. They sought mirrors to confirm the existence of what they didn’t want to see. They had severely limited vision. They passed their death date every year without acknowledging it, and pushed their breath into rubber bladders to commemorate being born. Their needs were too great. Doing nothing to save their kind required the participation of everyone. Every one of them began as a baby, and collectively they were—relative to the history of this planet—extraordinarily young.
Life Note
Dear Boys,
Because I was spending so much time with Bubbe over the past couple of months, she was often on my mind as I wrote this book. It made a certain amount of sense, given the themes: survival, generational responsibility, ends and beginnings. But I also stopped caring if it made sense. There is a refrain in the first suicide note: “To whom do I speak today?” That question is woven through the author’s dispute with himself, as if its answer might resolve the dispute. This is no kind of suicide note—it is the opposite of a suicide note—but as I have written, I have returned to the same refrain: To whom do I speak today? I started this book with the desire to convince strangers to do something. And while I continue to hope it will do that, as I reach the end, I find myself wanting to address only you.
I was going to take a train to D.C. to see Bubbe this morning, but decided to wait until the weekend, so I could bring you down with me. Grandma called not long after I got back from taking you to school and told me that Bubbe had just passed away. I went straight to Penn Station, slept through the Amtrak ride, and was at Grandma and Pops’s house by lunch.
I’m now in Bubbe’s room. The funeral home isn’t going to come for her body for a couple of hours. I’m sitting beside her bed. Julian and Jeremy were here for a while. Judy, too. Grandma and Pops have been in and out. But now it’s just me.
It’s the strangest thing not to see the sheet that covers her rising and falling. I keep looking for it, waiting for it, and it keeps not happening. And yet the room still feels as full of her life as ever. It doesn’t have to be her heart beating her heartbeat.
* * *
Your great-grandfather, Bubbe’s husband, killed himself a few years after immigrating to America from Europe. I’m not sure if you knew that—or if you knew that you knew it. It’s one of those things that is always never talked about. He survived the Holocaust, but he couldn’t survive his survival. He died twenty-three years before I was born, and until recently, all that I knew about him was gleaned from a few stories Grandma told me—most of them having to do with how clever and resourceful he was. I didn’t know that he killed himself until I was in my thirties. I had to figure it out for myself. In the last few years, Grandma has been much more open about it. Recently, she shared some scraps of paper that were in his pocket when he died—the pieces of a suicide note. The first begins: “My Etele is the best wife in the world.”
Isn’t it strange how the beginning of his suicide note could also be the beginning of a Valentine’s card? The writer Albert Camus once wrote, “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” Your great-grandfather loved his family very much. Sadness and joy aren’t opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.
Maybe one day I’ll share with you the notes that Grandma shared with me. They weren’t brought together into one text, weren’t addressed to anyone, weren’t an explanation. I called them a suicide note, but really, what do you call a note like that?
* * *
Fifteen years after your great-grandfather killed himself, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Grandma watched it on television with Bubbe. Don’t you wish you had been alive to see that happen? Do you ever think about all the things in the past that you weren’t alive to see, or all the things in the future that you won’t be alive to see? I just imagined you reading these words when I’m no longer alive.
While Armstrong prepared for his mission, President Nixon’s speechwriter prepared some remarks in case the astronauts were stranded on the moon. Here’s how that speech, titled “In Event of Moon Disaster,” begins:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
If you think about it, how different is it to be an astronaut stranded on the moon than a person living on Earth? You could say that both are stranded. And neither has any “hope for recovery,” in the sense that everyone who lives has to die. You could even say that there is “hope for mankind in their sacrifice,” if you believe that most people spend their lives contributing to the creation of the world, rather than its destruction. The difference between these two conditions is that, between now and our deaths, only those of us lucky to be stranded on Earth can make ourselves at home.
When Grandma and Bubbe watched the moon landing, they heard Armstrong say what is probably the most f
amous sentence in human history: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He had meant to say, “One small step for a man,” but in that overwhelming moment, the single letter was forgotten. The lowercase a is among the physically smallest letters in the alphabet. It’s the only lowercase letter that can stand alone, a word unto itself. Maybe he subconsciously omitted it from his statement because he knew that he did not stand alone, that he was not a word unto himself. Probably not.
He’d meant to refer to the single step of an individual, but without the a, it was a small step for the human race: “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”
In order to contribute to the creation of the world, rather than its destruction, an individual must act on behalf of the collective. Humankind takes leaps when individuals take steps.
“In Event of Moon Disaster” was on display at the New York Public Library during the period when I would go there every day to work on my first novel. I looked at it during breaks, aware that it was revealing something to me, but unsure of what.
Five years later, I was about to become a father. I went into a bodega and saw a quart of milk with an expiration date after Sasha’s due date, and believed, for the first time, that he was going to be born. Even though I’d seen sonograms, felt him moving in Mom’s belly, followed the progress of his growth, the birth of a child was too unprecedented, too large, to conceptualize. But I’d many times experienced what happens when milk’s expiration passes.
The familiar was my bridge to the unfamiliar, just as the unfamiliar (the improbable terror of being stranded on the moon) was my bridge to the familiar (the improbable fortune of being home on Earth). Nixon’s undelivered speech also enhanced my appreciation for what did happen—it suddenly seemed miraculous to me that we put people on the moon and we brought them home. I had been told the story so many times, an alternative did not occur to me until it was also told. That’s why I kept returning to the speech during my breaks—it was addressed to people in another time, to help them contemplate what didn’t happen, but it was also addressed to us, to help us contemplate what did.
If we could read an “In Event of Catastrophic Climate Change” speech now, or dig up testimonies from generations to come, or take a meeting with a Karski-equivalent to hear news of unprecedented environmental horror, or pluck a bottle from the ocean bearing a message from our great-great-great-grandchildren, or find scraps of our own suicide notes in the pockets of our clothing, would this evidence bridge the unfamiliar with the familiar and help us understand it? Would we believe what we understood?
* * *
When I was your age, I used to rummage through Grandma and Pops’s closet, hoping to find something I didn’t want to find: condoms, marijuana, even a porno. Your grandparents were either more straitlaced than I gave them credit for, or better hiders. The only unexpected thing I ever found was an envelope in Pops’s dresser, tucked in the back of a drawer with black socks and squash balls. Across its front he had written: For my family.
I didn’t dare open it, as that would have given away my pastime, but I didn’t feel a need to open it. It’s still there. I check on it every now and then. (I actually just checked on it a couple of minutes ago.) I know that he has edited it, because the For my family script changes—the size, the color of the pen. While I can’t rule out the possibility that the envelope is filled with condoms, marijuana, and porn, or a message that says, “Stop looking through my things!” I’ve always felt sure of what it contains: a few concise sentences about how much he loved his family, followed by scrupulously organized information about estate planners, insurance policies, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, cemetery plots, organ donorship, and so on. That’s who Pops is. There were years of my life when that drove me crazy. Why couldn’t he be more emotional, more expressive? Where was the wildness required by a finite life?
But then I became an adult, and I had you, and now I understand him differently. Pops would seek the advice of an accountant only if he feared he didn’t pay enough taxes. He ate red meat twice a day for most of his life but effectively became vegetarian after his parents died of heart attacks. Your grandfather has probably written one hundred unpublished letters to the editor.
To whom are those unpublished letters to the editor speaking?
What do you call a note like the one in his dresser?
* * *
Forty-three years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and said, “One small step for man,” an artist named Trevor Paglen launched one hundred photographs into space. They were micro-etched onto an “ultra-archival disc” and encased in a gold-plated shell. His goal was to create images that will last “as long as the sun, if not longer.” In 2012, this disc was sent into what is called “stable orbit,” meaning at that height—22,236 miles—the effects of gravity and centripetal forces balance out, and, as long as future humans and aliens don’t interfere, it will continue to circle Earth until there is no Earth to circle.
Paglen chose photographs that range from photojournalism to near-abstraction, from didactic to impressionistic: the construction of an atomic bomb, orphans seeing the sea for the first time, the sky through blossoming branches, smiling children in a World War II Japanese internment camp, a rocket launch, a stone tablet containing early mathematics.
I don’t know what he intended to say with his choices. There is a photo of Trotsky’s brain, the set of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the interior of a factory farm, Ai Weiwei giving the finger to the Eiffel Tower, dinosaur footprints, deep space as seen through the Hubble telescope, the construction of the Hoover Dam, a dandelion, Tokyo at night from above. Paglen’s research assistant Katie Detwiler said that they explicitly did not want the project to “be, or appear to be, any attempt to represent humanity—as if that’s some stable and monolithic entity.” The photographs don’t seem to be trying to communicate with another intelligent life-form. Unlike with Carl Sagan’s “Golden Record”—which included spoken greetings in fifty-five ancient and modern languages and music from various cultures, as well as images of mathematical and physical equations, the solar system and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy—there seems to be no effort to explain Earth and its inhabitants. The art curator João Ribas called it a “cosmic message in a bottle.”
In 1493, on the way back to Spain from the New World, Christopher Columbus’s ship was caught in a terrible North Atlantic storm, and he feared that he and his crew would drown. So he wrote a message to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella describing his discoveries, wrapped the note in a waxed cloth, and put that in a cask, which he then threw into the sea. It’s possible that the cask is still floating in the ocean somewhere, like Neil Armstrong’s a in space, coexisting with all the other things that could have happened but didn’t, and all the things that will happen but haven’t happened yet: my grandfather’s exhalation as he blew out the candles of his forty-fifth birthday cake, the gasps of passengers looking back at what used to be their home, the first breath of the last human.
The one hundred photographs orbiting Earth remind me of the thirty-five thousand papers that the Jews of Warsaw buried during the Holocaust, and of the seeds protected in vaults in case of an agricultural catastrophe. But more than anything, they remind me of the notes in your great-grandfather’s pocket: fragments declaring nothing, explaining nothing, questioning nothing. Only arguing.
* * *
There are many reasons why I will never be an astronaut: a lack of physical fitness, a lack of mental fitness, scientific ignorance. Topping the list is my fear of flying. It’s entirely manageable but present every time I get on a plane. These days, it only manifests as concealable panic during turbulence and a runway ritual: as the plane barrels toward takeoff, I say to myself, over and over, “More life … More life … More life…”
To whom am I saying, “More life”? I suppose some part of me believes that if there were a God, and if God could hear me, and could be persuaded to care about me, the simpl
e statement of appreciation of life, and request for more, might be enough to earn me a safe flight. But I don’t believe in God. Or at least not in a God who listens, much less responds, to prayer.
I don’t believe that the pilot is affected by my prayer. I don’t believe that the plane is affected by my prayer. I don’t believe that the weather is affected by my prayer.
As I barrel down the runway, repeating “More life … More life … More life…,” I think about my life. I think about it in a way that I don’t in any other context. Those thoughts take the form of images. They are not etched onto silicon and sent into stable orbit, where they will exist for hundreds of millions of years. They bloom and wilt in my mind.
I am affected by my prayer.
What do you call a prayer like that? The opposite of a suicide note?
In Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a character is summarized in the following line: “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” If I could spend my entire life barreling down one long runway, I would appreciate what I have so much more than I do now. But if I had to spend my entire life barreling down a runway, I would never have what I appreciate, because I would never be home.
* * *
I’m back in Bubbe’s room, although she’s no longer here. Two men from the funeral parlor came around an hour ago to take her away. If being with her body was peaceful, watching her get wrapped up, carried down the stairs and out the front door, was pretty horrible. The thieves who stole the Mona Lisa took the painting out the museum’s front door, which made the event all the more shocking. How could it have been allowed to happen?
We Are the Weather Page 15