A Survivor’s Guide to 2024

It looks like 2024 will be a hard and frequently scary year.

On this weekend, we should talk mostly about what to pack for such a year, what to bring with us for the gray days ahead.

Being alive in 2024 seems daunting, overwhelming. The Earth itself has begun to reject our presence, and, as we hand our fates over to autocrats, liars and tech ogres, it often seems as though the planet is displaying good taste.

The first thing to do is to remember how reassuringly vast and rich human culture is. The first human drawings in a cave happened 75,000 years ago. The oldest known poem was written more than 4,000 years ago.

Greek astronomers, 2,100 years ago, built a mechanical model of the sun, the moon and the known planets. It was arguably the first computer, able to predict eclipses and future planetary positions using a system of gears I can't begin to understand.

After a few decades on land, the computer sank to the bottom of the sea after a shipwreck and was found by sponge divers in 1900. Roughly one-third of it was salvage

d and resurrected. O brave old world that had the Antikythera Mechanism in it.

Take a little bit of solace from the truth that, over thousands of years, our species has done many remarkable things, all the while trying to understand the world and universe into which it was born.

You might feel alone. You're not. You're standing in a line of people that stretches back eons through the darkness of time. If you listen, they're talking to you. The poet William Meredith wrote, “To see the extraordinary data, you have to distance yourself a little, utterly.” (That poem, framed, hangs behind where I am sitting now.)

Speaking of that, pick a poet. Maybe the one you loved in high school or college. Maybe someone new. Poets are like dogs. You take a walk with them and they lead you to some unexpected vista.

Mine is Walt Whitman. Always and forever. He died in 1892, but I know the guy, and he talks to me. You might want to read his “Winter:” “Every snowflake lay where it fell, the multitudinous leaves and branches piled, bulging white, defined by edge-lines of emerald.”

Or read your own poet. Dickinson, Neruda, Gorman, Catullus, Basho. You choose.

Find some new music that feeds and surprises you. This week I am in love with the jazz violinist Sara Caswell, who also plays modernist art music (or something) and owns one of the 20 or so Hardanger d'amores: a fiddle made by a luthier in an obscure Norwegian town. The fiddle has 10 strings. Five are played, and the other five are “sympathetic,” reacting to the vibrations of the played strings, so that instrument sometimes seems to be singing to itself.

O brave new world, that has Hardanger d'amores in it.

Embrace an artist. Find the one who makes your sympathetic string vibrate. For me, it's Odilon Redon. Show me 25 still lifes, and I can probably pick out the one he painted. Go to museums. I'm saying this to myself. I stopped during the pandemic and need to restart.

Laugh. Laugh so hard that the other person in the room considers calling 911 when you can't catch your breath. This happened to me recently watching Rob Reiner's documentary about his lifelong friend, Albert Brooks. The footage of Brooks' early TV appearances — the elephant trainer whose elephant was shipped to the wrong address and must perform the same tricks with a frog — endangered my life.

Re-read a book that meant a lot to you when you were younger. I'm two-thirds of the way through the Deptford trilogy by the Canadian author Robertson Davies. In 1981, I visited John Irving in a New York City hotel room. One of those Davies books lay on a table. I tracked them down and discovered a human world I longed to live in. People in Toronto, Mexico City, Zurich foraging through old, arcane sources of mystery and wisdom, trying to piece together an outline of life and death.

Forty-two years later, that world has aged pretty well.

Meditate. I don't really know how to meditate. That is, I am unable to sit quietly and have an unfiltered, unmanaged thought.

But I can pick some words and let them sift and percolate until they are mantra-ized. Today, a friend in Tennessee, moved by something I'd written, sent me some words by the Franciscan sister and theologian Ilia Delio. This part jumped out at me:

“We cannot know this mystery of Christ as a doctrine or an idea; it is the root reality of all existence. Hence we must travel inward, into the interior depth of the soul where the field of divine love is expressed in the ‘thisness' of our own, particular lives.”

There's a path. It might lead into a cave where Homo erectus worshipped bears. It might lead inward, to the caves of heart and soul.

The challenges of the coming year will include heat and rain and war and intolerance and falsehoods.

It would be a bad idea to walk, undernourished, in those fields. Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday.