What I’m Reading
As heat and humidity soar in an Indian city, an aid worker struggles to help his neighbours survive a heatwave that will claim 15 million lives. The Ministry for the Future, a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, uses this beginning as a springboard for imagining a near future in which the world stumbles towards answers to the climate puzzle.
It’s not a great success as a novel – few characters attain three dimensions – but worth reading as a fascinating map of how we might avoid calamity. I’ve been reading about climate change – fiction, poetry or non-fiction – as a way of coping with climate anxiety.
Since 2008, the poet Jorie Graham has recorded in four books her own states of mind as she observes the natural world. [To] the Last [Be] Human, which collects those books, is a huge, sprawling compendium of jewel-like glimpses and attempts to describe our place in the cosmos – demanding and rewarding in equal measure. Graham aims to help us recover a sense of wonder and awe.
In The Enchantment of Modern Life, philosopher Jane Bennett explains why that’s so important. ‘‘You have to love life before you can care about anything.’’
That means resisting the idea that the world has lost its magic, whether we see that as a good thing (goodbye superstition) or a bad thing (hello alienation).
For guaranteed magic, I go back to the world of medieval troubadour poets in Lark in the Morning, edited by Robert Kehew – especially Arnaut Daniel, translated by Ezra Pound: ‘‘I, Arnaut, love the wind, doing / My hare-hunts on an ox-cart, / And I swim against the torrent’’.
Wonderful. Awesome even.