Humanity in the end
The world may be doomed, but book argues love and empathy are the only way forward
Although he says he was only doing his duty, as he was brought up to do, Jonathan Franzen did a very kind thing: he visited Walt, his uncle by marriage, a man who had lost his only child, was married to an unpleasant person, found love with Franzen’s mother after they both lost their spouses and ultimately ended up alone. He moved to Florida and Franzen made a point of visiting.
Walt’s story is in Franzen’s new book, The End of the End of the Earth. About love, compassion, empathy, it resonates, coming as it does in a book of essays about the potential end of humanity.
Franzen downplays it as an act of kindness. “My mother, who Walt had loved, instilled in us kids the notion that once you’re friends with someone you’re loyal to them.”
Franzen was on the phone from his home in California on the very afternoon that Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate judiciary committee ahead of Kavanaugh’s investiture in the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s hard times here in the U.S.,” the celebrated author says. “It’s a real ugly, ugly, ugly partisan warfare that’s going on.” One that, he says, he tries to restrict his intake of.
“It’s funny and it seems to have got worse precisely in the years that Twitter and Facebook were on the rise,” he says. “Social media are about rage, and rage and hatred provoke, and provocation makes people use these things more and the Silicon Valley companies laugh all the way to the bank as they collect the data.” He pauses. “Tell me things are better in Canada.” Maybe people are afraid, I suggest. “We could talk quite a bit about this,” he says.
The essays in this new collection do just that. The overarching themes are writing, birds — which he loves, even if they don’t love him back — and climate change, but connecting them is a desire for empathy and humanity.
“Of course, (there’s) a great irony to those ‘90s futurists talking about how tech would bring us all together and we would understand each other’s minds so beautifully,” he points out. “Funny, it turned out just the opposite.”
Even when he’s being reasonably benign Franzen tends to cause controversy. In the book is a single page list, titled “Ten Rules for the Novelist.” Rule 10 is, “You have to love before you can be relentless.” While that might seem true for the novelist as much as the essay writer, it also seems pompous to some and the list has caused a Twitter frenzy, unleashing a firestorm of alternative Top 10 lists and much mocking of Franzen’s dislike of social media.
Another is his take on climate change. He is hard on climate deniers, also hard on those who embrace that it’s happening but still believe collective action can change its course. Doesn’t that make it kind of hard to want to turn off the tap and use low energy light bulbs, I ask, when nothing is going to make a difference? The feeling that this is the end?
“Well, it is and it isn’t the end,” he says. “To put it very simply I know about every single person I love that they’re going to die, pretty soon. And it would of course be absurd to say, well, you should stop caring about these people.”
But with climate change, for example, jays might disappear. “They might all be gone, but you know you’re going to have Baltimore orioles in the Yukon and
FRANZEN continued on E3
they’ll be making their home, and it’ll still be the Baltimore oriole and it’ll be kind of weird. But it’s not like history ends, it just gets really weird.”
And we just don’t know where we’re going to be in the middle of all that, right?
“Well, exactly. The prognosis for civil society is looking rather grim I have to say.”
And yet. These essays take us to Albania, to Egypt, places where people are more concerned about survival and less concerned about climate change. In “May Your Life Be Ruined” he describes birds being trapped in nets and wiped out by gratuitous hunting in some regions of Albania and then, thanks to a change in government policy, hunting is banned and they have a chance of making a comeback.
These ideas of connection permeate the other essays. At the end of “9/13/01” — two days after everything changed — is a line about what the U.S. needed to do: “mourn the dead and then try to awaken to our small humanities and our pleasurable daily nothing-much.” The tension here is both heartening and heartbreaking.
It’s not a sweeping narrative, the type you might have become used to in his huge novels like Purity, say, or The Corrections, but there is a scope even in the economy with which these essays are written, a tension between big picture and everyday life that somehow bridges the two and holds us in the present moment — when we still have a choice as to how to act, right now.
But it’s better to show than explain. The next to last essay, “The End of the End of the Earth,” is about a trip to Antarc- tica. He ends up there because Walt left him a bit of money in his will. Enough to go on an expensive cruise, one where he can try to spot one of the rare birds he hasn’t seen in the wild: the Emperor penguin. As with the rest of his essays, though, it’s about much more than that.
“Sitting in the lounge of a ship burning three and a half gallons of fuel per minute, we listened to Adam extol the benefits of shopping at farmers’ markets and changing our incandescent bulbs to LED bulbs.”
The irony is presented matter-of-factly, almost sardonically.
Still, Franzen is there, sitting on a cruise in the Antarctic, surrounded by rich people, when class raises its head again. While they glide along in the ship, one (rich) “climatechange skeptic” notes that he owns residential properties and his subsidized tenants “always kept their homes too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer because they didn’t pay for their utilities.” Another woman said, “I think the ultrawealthy waste far more than people in subsidized housing.” The conversation ended, the others heading out to pack.
Franzen lays bare the tension in life: big changes are happening, our humanity lies in continuing to do the little things. So it seems the real takeaway is that empathy is important and compassion is important. All of these other things are going to be happening around us, but these are the things that really matter.
“That’s not a bad thing to be getting out,” he concedes. He pauses. “No, that’s good, that’s good. The opposite of fear is love.”
And maybe that, after all, is the thing that will save us.