We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead; . . .

The other day at Facebook I shared a New Yorker commentary by Jonathan Franzen, whose subtitle is “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.” To which a friend immediately appended a lengthy tweet from Sarah Kaplan that begins with this observation: “I’m not linking to that Jonathan Franzen essay (which is not only poorly argued but completely mischaracterizes the scientific understanding of climate change and its impacts on society),” and then ends up more or less agreeing with Franzen. Apparently Kaplan prefers other doomsday scenarios projected by Kate Marvel and Dan Zak, but her complaint strikes me as a distinction without a difference, as we used to say. The core of her argument with Franzen, that his essay urges a retreat from the world is itself a mischaracterization, as is an attempt to sensationalize both that has just appeared in The Nation.

But this not-quite-dispute puts me in mind of something I had read a few weeks ago in a Washington Post essay by Elizabeth Breunig that contains an interview with Robert Jeffress, pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church and one of our president’s most ardent supporters. By way of explaining his many defenses of the president against moral criticisms lodged by liberals, Jeffress explained:

As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns, If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. . . . I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.

I also thought of an essay I had written not long ago in which I was able to find no real hope for our civilization or our planet short of a miracle. That essay is here, if you want to read it. I’m far from sharing Jeffress’ understanding of scripture but allowing for the difference in how Christian humanists such as myself and evangelicals identify the causes of our respective doomsday scenarios, one may venture to point out that we share a conviction that the world is poised upon the cusp of a monumental happening. Whether that happening is to be viewed as a disaster or not is one of the many things that divide liberals and evangelicals culturally. It’s easy to deny everything from science to the cookie monster if one views present stresses as a prelude to the end times. But we have just had a foretaste of what lies ahead of us from my perspective in the fact that the president seized command of weather forecasting even as hurricane Dorian wreaked death and destruction upon the Bahamas on its way up the east coast towards the Carolinas and the Maritime provinces.

As if the well-established prospect of climate disaster weren’t enough, we in the United States have now to fear the collapse of our social safety net, the erosion or downright loss of the rule of law and the system of political norms we have built up over a long history of corporate self-discovery, together with the entire system of international alliances we have built up since the second world war. Internationally, the world is being upended by migration on a scale we have not seen since late antiquity, by the renewal of age-old ethnic and religious hostilities and the threat of new hostilities between nations and social classes as a result of short-sighted and venal attempts by governments and corporations to control and/or shape the future to produce one set of projected outcomes or another in order to serve the interests of one set of beneficiaries or another. The world stage is set, it seems to me, for the end of the epoch in which I have lived all my life.

But it is a more than moral certainty that the future will be shaped by historical forces and developments we lack present ability to discern and that projections whether from science or scripture or from the study of history, however deep, amount to seeing through a glass darkly. The present question seems to me to be what to make of whatever interim we have, a question that will present itself with differing urgencies and imperatives depending upon one’s perceived position in the scheme of things. Refugees and members of oppressed classes will understand this question differently from the many of us whose affluence affords a safe view—by safe I mean relatively safe, of course. Many of our fellow humans whose lives were recently lost in the Bahamas believed themselves to be safe, even as the hurricane descended upon them. The lesson from Dorian for those who have an ear, as Jesus said, is that all our lives, indeed all human energies and enterprises, hang by a thread.

I’ve recently had a series of experiences that have brought this truth home to me in an intensely personal way. Last fall I learned that I had a kind of heart failure that made it necessary that I change my life. Then, before I had a chance to accommodate to the changes that were necessary, I had a stroke that left me struggling with blood pressure that was too high one day, too low the next. Now, just day before yesterday I have fallen down the stairs in my house, a stairway comprising some thirteen steps, fourteen if I count the step up from the landing at the top. Fortunately I broke no bones and escaped with a few cuts and bruises, the cuts having been caused by the shattering of a tempered glass coffee cup I was carrying as I commenced my fall. The most frightening memory I have of the experience is the memory of my legs giving way underneath me and my inability to control my fall, like my stroke a calamity that could recur at any time. Somewhere in these pages I have mentioned that my old friend, A. C. Greene from Abilene once told me he believed one should have a personal reason for whatever convictions one held. At the time I discounted the thought as trivial, but I hadn’t yet lived as long as A. C., who was facing a heart transplant at the time of that remark.

I find it impossible now to separate my thoughts about the future of life in the world around me from my expectation of death. I don’t mean this in a morbid way. Indeed, as I was falling downstairs the other day I was fully conscious and have no memory of thinking anything like, “Oh God, this is it!” though my family tells me that I cried out that I was dying. Rather I thought before I hit bottom, “Oh shit, what am I going to do now!” I recall the truly terrifying loss of my legs’ ability to feel and to hold me up as I stepped from the top landing onto the first step coming down. I remember being unable to feel my left knee for a bit with the hand I found myself resting on it at the bottom of the stairs and then feeling my son’s hands massaging my ankles and calves after I cried out that I couldn’t feel my legs. I was the one who suggested that I not be moved and that we summon an ambulance; and after my deep gratitude to my beloved and my son, who is staying with us for a time, I am profoundly grateful for the professionalism of the Saint Louis firefighters and paramedics. I understand that I experienced their grace under pressure and ability to size things up and cope with me not as one of a succession of victims they see in a day’s work but as a person who it turned out was not gravely injured but might have been. They, and the teams of medical professionals who treated me at Saint Louis University Hospital, quite literally saved my life in a circumstance with which I and my family were momentarily unable to cope. As I think about it all at the remove of a couple of days from the existential crisis I find myself thinking that saving my life meant returning my autonomy as a person to me, but I also realize that their professionalism could have coped with the eventuality of my losing the ability to function autonomously and that indeed a good part of their professionalism entailed the ability to know the difference between someone like me and that other someone I was not, whose case required  levels of care that I did not require. Though my first trauma center experience involved being placed in a neck brace and having boards rammed underneath me so that X-rays could be made of my spine, it was only after these were supplemented by a CT scan that the neck brace was removed and my wounds were treated.

Several codes were called in the trauma center during  my stay that were accompanied by staff rushing one way or another. At one point I remember overhearing someone describe a nearby patient who had used up two cans of Narcan spray without regaining consciousness. Today, in the aftermath of having my life saved by timely intervention, I find that I remain more or less indifferent to the prospect of my death as I have been since I began to think about it some years ago. I plan not to descend the stairs again at home until we are able to install a chair lift; which is to say that if I fear anything it is the prospect of falling again. I know I need to resume a certain level of participation in the various communities that make up my social life, something I had ceased to do since my stroke. I especially need to return to something like my pre-stroke level of exercise. Perhaps falling downstairs was a memento mori, for it has reminded me that for some time I have had the desire to write about what ageing feels like. My normal writing pose is, I think, ageless. Most friends and family tell me that I am not old. Still, I think there is something about my time of life that I would like to seize upon and perhaps affirm, something that has escaped me so far. I have no interest in my life story as a narrative of decline or progress. I’ve lived through various ups and downs in my checkered career, as my old friend Sam Ragan used to say, and I have enjoyed it all richly. Recently I read a New Yorker essay by Ceridwen Dovey entitled “What Old age is Really Like” that may have fueled my desire to write about ageing. Dovey, who is young, nevertheless writes engagingly and perceptively about the elderly in a way I can relate to my own lived experience. But there is something missing from her analysis. I only realized what it was when I began to realize today that I have both aesthetic and moral expectations about death that reveal themselves only as I think about the prospect of planetary death as well as my own.

Midway in her argument, Dovey mentions the work of Kate Rossiter, “Who advocates fostering ‘ethical responsibility’ rather than empathy in medical practitioners.” Dovey is on her way to explaining a comment by a friend, who became a geriatric specialist, to the effect that “There’s something almost greedy about empathy because it relies on the notion that we can somehow assimilate the other.” While I can understand a preference for professional responsibility over empathy in medical practitioners—certainly the professionalism I have noted among the many folk who intervened to save my life was not empathy. Indeed empathy might have stood in the way of that professionalism. But I am finding the rest of Dovey’s friend’s comment about empathy incomprehensible. Empathy is what binds us together as a human community, the love that Jesus urged as the second great commandment. It is a thing that medical practitioners, especially surgeons, have to learn to restrain; but woe to the practitioner who entirely loses the ability to identify with the other. “A respectful and thoughtful distance” may be “part of what enables us to respond to the other’s needs,” but it is empathy, with all its potential for enabling harm and misunderstanding, that calls the other to our attention as a fellow human. Please understand that I make no exclusive claims for Christianity, but I note that after the first and great commandment to love God, Jesus taught the love of neighbor—and his formalization of the commandment is specifically to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. That’s a pretty good definition of empathy.

Which is why I have never been able to reconcile myself to Pastor Jeffress’ understanding of the world. It requires me willingly to consign the great mass of humanity to perdition. But I still have to understand why it is that contemplating the prospect of my own death takes on meaning as I view that prospect in light of the possibility of the loss of earth. I doubt that Franzen or Kaplan or any of the other writers I mention in my opening statement really believes that time has run out for our planet. But they all accept as an ever more probable certainty that our children’s children will inherit a ruined planet plagued by cataclysmic disaster, largely unfriendly to life as we have known it; and that this circumstance is being brought ever closer to us by our commitment to the extractive practices upon which we depend to sustain economic growth. It’s not my intention to pursue this argument further except to point out that it is human nature that persuades Franzen that human kind is incapable of doing the necessary work to combat climate change. I have no belief in a personal god, but it has been an article of faith for me that life will survive my death, that generations will survive to remember, if not me, then at least my time, that earth, wonderful beyond any power of mine to imagine it; as I say, earth, wonderful, generative, infinitely various and inventive earth, and the cosmos beyond, “When I consider the heavens” the psalmist wrote: and all of time and the great and wonderful planetary systems with their stars and comets and deep black holes—that all of this will survive my death. And it will, of course. What happens on this small planet in no way cancels the great scheme of time and the universe. But how shall I bear myself towards death when my small planet and my beloved country may indeed be destroyed by human error and mendacity; that is the question I ask myself now.

During the cold war we were fearful that nuclear war would destroy the planet. Now, the cold war has returned to threaten us with death by a thousand cuts. I feared this in the aftermath of 9/11 as we charged pell-mell into an ever more culturally and morally debilitating endless war that has paralyzed us now in webs of ever more intrusive surveillance and militarism and laid the groundwork for a massive, worldwide loss of personhood hardly contemplated in former times. I cannot, in this circumstance, withhold empathy from any human being. We are all of us, liberal, evangelical, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jew, black and brown and pink like me, male, female, queer, trans and genderless, Dine, Lakota and the many tribes, bound together in the community of those who will die in uncertain times. Alice Major is Edmonton’s Poet Laureate. I was put on to her recent book “Welcome to the Anthropocene” by the Dan Zak essay I cite above. Her prologue begins “Alas. poor child, you’re born / in medias res — the stage is set / with swirling depictions of a globe / in panic, . . . /  And you have got to figure out the script. / It’s that recurrent nightmare / of being unprepared, of never / having studied, and now it’s curtain time.” But as the poem continues it seems to imagine at least the possibility of some better dream that is “just our human / situation — the only plot we’ve got / in this play without an author.” The poem’s speaker takes her leave with an apology, ” . . . I can’t help you. I am just / another figure in the chorus / of greying heads, wringing her hands / or pointing to a star.” And then this:

. . . Don’t look for gods
descending in a basket,
or prompters in the wings.
Declaim one memorable soliloquy.
Turn a spotlight. Or pick up
pelting litter from the stage.
There is no ending, happy
or otherwise.  Just play your part.

We are like the “dear white children” in Auden’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia” playing, casual as birds “among the ruined languages.” Perhaps the best we can hope for the story of our time is that it tell of our promise and our death. Or perhaps it might tell of our promise only and leave the death to God. We are like the astronauts in Michener’s Space, trapped on the moon with no possibility of return, whose last words evoke the humanist dream of Walter Miller’s classic science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, wherein a band of monks is able to replicate the whole of human civilization after the bomb from a fragment of a grocery list left to them by Leibowitz, their founder.

—Blessed Saint Leibowitz, keep ’em dreamin’ down there . . . you know the rest.