Category: General

Six Years of Mostly About Stories

I started Mostly About Stories towards the end of January, 2019, which makes it about six years old and provides the excuse for this post. I’ll cover some things I did this year, some writing I’ve done, and the statistics.

If you want to know what I’ve read and enjoyed this year, you can check out the updated All Posts page.

Personal

This past year I moved to Germany, where hopefully, employers willing, I will remain for the next year or two. For various reasons, primarily interrail tickets and the German Deutschlandticket, which gives me unlimited travel on all non-long-distance public transport at a very reasonable price, I have been quite busy travelling about. I’ve seen the Black Forest, Berlin, Hamburg and Luebeck, Copenhagen, Vienna, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Amsterdam, Tessel, Norderney, Utrecht, Maastricht, Aachen and Muenster. Of these, I do regret that after visiting Heidegger’s cottage in Todtnauberg the blog post on him never materialised. Another time. 

Compared to Russia, Germany is not very exciting. Still, I cannot say I’m not glad to be in a location where war seems unthinkable. While my German is reasonably good and improving daily, it’s challenging to integrate fully where I am, though I am working on it. Mostly, I end up with my co-workers. I would say the atrophy of my Russian has been halted by having many colleagues from that part of the world, while my Ukrainian has improved, now I have a friend here so crazy about a certain vision of her country that she has a trident stuck on her arm. Progress on my Polish is not good enough for my girlfriend, especially when I am learning Ukrainian over it, which even Ukrainians like to tell me is useless to me. Still, we get there too, slowly.

When I wrote my Three Years of Mostly About Stories post, I was struggling with combining work and reading, to say nothing of the writing I wasn’t doing. The company I was with didn’t know what to do with me, my immigration status in Russia felt precarious, and I was living under the shadow of a war that, it turned out, really was imminent.

Now I can say with some confidence that things have never been so good. I have a flat within walking distance of work, with green spaces nearby, and friends around. I actually have friends, where moving to Moscow was merely entering a vortex of potentiality. Work is fine – I am finishing up a graduate scheme so I get to try a variety of things to really work out what it is I want to be doing – and I get paid well. As noted, I’ve done lots of travelling. But the main thing is that I have finally sorted out the writing.

Writing

Mostly About Stories is a bit of fun and I hope readers treat it as such. The real thing is to become a writer of great fiction. To do that, I must first become a writer of fiction. At school I wrote a novel, which after paying an editor to go through, was picked up by an agent. I then, being about sixteen, got bored, feeling I was improving so fast that there was no point bothering with that old work. This was a mistake, obviously, but whatever. At university, I used to reach a boil of inspiration where suddenly things would spill over and I’d spend a weekend neglecting my studies and spewing out a short story. These I was proud of, and ultimately self-published on Amazon for a few friends to buy. A little later, I took it down.

Even with those bright spots, I struggled to write. I wrote and was immediately disheartened by the words, which meant I ended up producing blank pages rather than drafts that could later be improved. War and Peace, a novel I hold in high esteem, and which seems supremely natural, was actually redrafted and line-edited something like ten times. Perhaps only Goethe could get perfection the first time round, but plenty of people have produced things which in the end were even better, and all because they did not give up on what they started. This was not me: I produced neither perfection nor imperfection, unless we count the blank page perfection, and I am not into that kind of game.

After graduating, I did write the odd story, but given I spent vast amounts of time unemployed thanks to a certain autocrat, I was not making the most of my time. Writers get better by writing, they often say. There might be more to it than that, but it’s a good starting point, and one I wasn’t much aligned with. For various reasons, but primarily this incessant self-criticism, I got nowhere. It was also a little disturbing that I had no “ideas” for a novel. Any amateur will find it’s fairly easy to come up with great ideas – the family saga, the modernised War and Peace, etc – but it soon becomes apparent that these overarching ideas must be broken down into little ideas, little narratives, or they will not be possible to write at all. It wouldn’t even be akin to building the skeleton of a house – it would be like putting up the walls without the edges, and watching them fall over at the first gust. It’s the little ideas, the observations that sparkle on each page, that make a novel great – great ideas for overarching stories are easy, as ultimately there’s less originality there than you might think.

Anyway, this idea that is absolutely central to my idea of my own self – that I am a writer, must be a writer – was finding little justification in reality. Until this year, round about the half way part.

I resolved it in two ways. The first solution arose last summer, when for the first time I had an idea for a “novel”. Something more modest and practical than the ideas above. On its own, that was no salvation. But I was also helped by technology. I went and bought a small folding phone stand and a Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike with my laptop, where I could always tab-out to something else, with a phone if you are in the writing app it’s harder to leave. This simple technological adjustment made it possible to write by lowering the barrier of entry and raising the barrier to exit. Rather than forcing myself with great effort to sit down in front of my computer, only to write a few words that disgusted me, and then immediately switch to some tab or video that would entertain me, here I could write with almost no effort at all. From bed, on a cramped train, lying on a sofa, and so on. Because phones have smaller screens, there was also only so much neurotic re-reading I could do. I just had to accept what I’d written, and move on.

The result was a novel. 114’000 words – some good, some definitely not – with a beginning, middle, end, and characters who were, at least when you squinted, recognisably human. Also, gladly, it was not a work that was “semi-autobiographical”, a phrase that always makes my stomach churn. This was and is, absolutely, something to be proud of. I had made something come into existence that only I could have done.

But once it was done, in this first draft, I realised I still could not write anything else. Inspiration is great, but clearly unreliable. At a given moment, I’ve got a couple of things I want to write, but not necessarily so desperately that I must write them. Not enough to go back to that same method, anyway.

A second revolution was needed, one that was far simpler. I adjusted my routine. I am something of a control-maniac, and one of the joys of my life in Germany is that I have my own flat and life here. Initially, I planned each day to get up a little before 8, then from 8:05 to 8:25 I did my morning routine (shower, bathroom, clothes, etc), before leaving at around 8:27 to ensure I arrived at work at 8:57 and in time for any 9:00 meetings. I had imagined that, when I came home each day, I could then have “half” of the day to myself. This was delusional. I was not tired, but I was tired enough that this was not leading to the results I wanted. Yes, I might read, but certainly I was not going to sit down and write.

I have always had struggles with sleeping, though not proper insomnia or anything that might lead to wacky fiction. In the autumn I was waking up regularly at say six and unable to get back to sleep easily, so I decided one day to have a go just getting up then. Combined with my morning cup of matcha, I found I had something functional. I still got ready to leave at 8:27 and kept my alarms in place, but instead those alarms were not reminding me to leave bed, but rather to finish up my writing. Now, I woke up around six forty with no alarm (having also moved my bedtime an hour earlier), got up, made my matcha, and sat down to write. I then wrote until the alarms forced me to get ready for work.

So far this method has been in operation for a few months. Not every day has been a success, but I would say the clear majority of mornings find me doing this. No matter how rubbish the words are, I get them down, between 500 and 1000 of them. I then head away to work, knowing that however badly I spend the rest of my time, my day has been no failure.

These are promising developments in the life of a writer. It is impossible for me to say whether the quality has improved, or will improve, with this system. We might also question whether writing in this way forces me to produce things that are less cohesive compared to the several thousand words I might write in a single day when the inspiration pressure cooker was overflowing at Cambridge. But at least I am writing. I have no particular desire to be published at this stage, so I am happy just to get drafts on the page, for further editing and examination down the line. I have a well-paying bourgeois job – I’m no starving writer desperately trying to see things in the papers. This gives me the luxury of writing as much as I want and whatever I want, before I actually start trying to make money off it.

Mostly About Stories is just a blog about the books that I’ve been reading, and will not contain my fiction as a matter of principle, though thematic interests may be shared between work “off the blog” and the work that does go on the blog. Thinking aloud is nice, but so is thinking on paper. Borges used to ask why he should write a book of five hundred pages when he could write a book review for this imaginary book and get it all down in five. I am no Borges, but writing the review first, then the novel itself, may not be a bad way to go in terms of learning thematic focus.

While I do not want to share my fiction on the blog (ewww…), readers who think they might be interested in reading and providing feedback should certainly get in touch.

Stats

There’s inevitably little visibility on the amount of views that literature blogs get, and I cannot see much harm in sharing my own. Last year I had a significant increase in views. I have no idea why but I cannot complain. I’ve also had interesting comments. Really that’s all I can ask for. If you are reading, thanks.

Conclusion

Anyway, it appears to have been a good year. I have entered 2025 reading more, writing more, and getting better at the things that matter. Now all I need is a permanent position at work, and things will be sehr gut indeed.

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative – Jane Alison

In our stories, we usually have “the dramatic arc”, where “a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides.” Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative asks how far a certain fixation with that idea might be holding us back by proposing, in an accessible way, some other forms that our fiction might take. In this, she serves us all by reminding us that the novel takes its name from the same root as novelty, and that if novels ever seem tired and staid, there always remain ways of recovering that same sense of newness / excitement.

Alison begins by noting that when we talk about narrative, it’s typically in visual terms. Northrop Frye is quoted as saying that “we hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means”. Narratives are generally experienced as images -or perhaps that’s how we explain them. Either way, Alison continues by suggesting that if readers experience narratives in this way, a writer could consciously choose to “design” a narrative with a particular shape in mind other than the typical arc. So far, so reasonable.

But why would the writer bother? Alison’s argument, built up through a liberal use of examples from longer and shorter fictions, is that we need different forms for different stories or ideas, or at least for different focuses. In a narrative about grief, must we always tell the story of overcoming, with its arching trajectory of shock and mourning to recovery? Or may we not, instead, focus on how grief works by showing how it ripples through the lives of those affected like a shockwave? In such a narrative there may be overcoming, but the focus is instead on variety and the writer as a kind of clinician, identifying human frailties and strengths.

From a basic toolkit of sentence and paragraph length and structure, the use of colour and any differences between story time and textual time, and other texturing such as repeated images, phrases, and scenes, Alison describes a wide variety of narrative patterns. There are “waves”, which are when the narrative is governed by the principle of symmetry, with scenes at the end mirroring those at the beginning. There are “wavelets”, which take this kind of mirroring and repeat it on a paragraph level. “Meanders” make use of digressions to force us to look around and refocus our attention on the scenery, while “spirals” advance chronologically while always looking back.

“Radials or explosions” are of the type I described above concerning grief – situations where everything looks into the centre, or where everything in the story is trying to pull away from some central point but cannot.  With “Networks and Cells”, “Instead of following a line of story, your brain draws the lines, makes connections.” This is Sebald, where you do the work of identifying meaning. Finally, there are “fractals”, where the meaning is the narrator’s searching for meaning rather than the plot itself, and “tsunamis”, where Alison could only find one example, which in any case seems something of a hybrid approach.

The examples are all contemporary, with writers I knew – such as Sebald and Carver – joined by others I was less familiar with, such Lin Tao and Susan Minot. Arguably, many of the storytelling structures are older than this – we have been disobeying Aristotle pretty much since he first put stylus to wax (or whatever he used). But to criticise the book on this point is to miss the idea that these forms are practically essential for telling certain stories that are increasingly important to us modern readers. Sebald writes differently, sure, but we also needed the horrors of the 20th century to really get to a point where we needed Sebald and his style – and felt the need to write about memory at all as a kind of moral duty.

Then there is David Foster Wallace’s digressive style and his ambition in his unfinished The Pale King to write a novel about boredom and working in tax that somehow was uplifting rather than miserable. Within Meander, Spiral, Explode we also have Susan Minot’s Lust, which uses a fragmentary style and shifting narrative voice to draw readers into the breakdown of self as a young woman’s sexual encounters get the better of her. Yes, Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else has a similar plot, but Minot’s work has a different focus and a different form to make that focus possible.

As an argument about the importance of finding the right form, and as a guide to some of the forms available, Meander, Spiral, Explode is fun and helpful. It would be hard for a writer to read it and not feel at least a little inspiration on how to write next. But there is one point where the book is arguably a little weaker. (I will discount the cataloguing aspect – for example, why “tsunami” has only one example, why “waves” seem fairly unrecognisable to someone who has spent much time at the sea, and so on – all this is unimportant).

The main criticism is one we might detect ourselves from the examples used. With one or two exceptions, we are primarily looking at shorter fiction – short stories, novellas, and short novels. The problem with all the patterns Alison proposes is that they struggle with being sustained into a longer work. There is only so far that we can sit with Sebald before we get tired, given that his shorter fictions in Campo Santo are just as effective as those in The Rings of Saturn, with only a slight adjustment for the power that accumulation brings in the latter. We might circle around the killing at the centre of Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold for a hundred or so pages, but not for much longer without any forward movement. To look at other examples not given in the text, the guilt narratives of Grass’s Cat and Mouse and Bernhard’s The Loser are all short too, barely scraping two hundred pages in some editions.

It’s no surprise then, that the narratives that are longest in Meander, Spiral, Explode are also the ones where the arc is still central. We can talk about the mirroring of scenes at the beginning and end of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, for example, but this is only a feature of a narrative that otherwise is a typical story of a relationship, from its beginning to its collapse. Cloud Atlas, the novel at the centre of the “tsunami” chapter, is huge – but it’s also six narratives in one.

This is not to suggest that patterns are bad, but rather that many struggle with an extension into longer works. We get bored, run out of energy, or even – most dangerously – have our moment of illumination too soon and put the book down, having understood what the author had in mind and lacking any comparably powerful plot to carry us on. Even if the pattern is delivering a moral message – and Alison is to be commended for showing through her examples that experimentation does not have to come at the expense of a sense of right and wrong – a pattern whose shape is determined too soon can lead to reader’s attention sagging. At least with a plot, the author is in charge, letting us know when we are in the beginning, middle, or end. If we want the whole thing, we have to follow them all the way.

I have been considering some of the problems in Meander, Spiral, Explode from a completely different angle this year, within the context of my re-reading of War and Peace. One of the great mysteries of that work is how it manages to keep the reader reading when it is so long. I am now reading, on and off, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, and will then read his Life and Fate, which together are probably at least as long as War and Peace and in the case of the latter, apparently nearly as good. With Stalingrad, however, I am struggling and was trying to understand why.

One reason is that Tolstoy does something that Grossman, at present, does not – he structures his book as a series of novellas with linked characters. We might describe one part of War and Peace as Natasha and Andrey’s romance, and another as Pierre’s experience of wartime Moscow. Other things happen in the parts, but each has a distinctive identity. Stalingrad is, after four hundred pages, just an accumulation – of people, primarily, and a little bit of plot. That makes it both harder to follow and less engaging. People might have a backstory, but they do not have much of a story in the present that drives the text forward. Instead, the only thing that does that is the historical context.

Because each section of Tolstoy’s epic is a kind of novella in itself, with an arc-like structure, the work remains engaging, providing a little bit of that same satisfaction that a shorter, complete novel would. We can say that War and Peace reaches the limit of the arc and has to adjust by breaking it into little arcs, just as some of the narratives in Meander, Spiral, Explode reach the length limit of their own patterns. The really interesting question for authors is how you can expand the patterns of Alison’s book to incorporate them into longer works, for I am sure that the selection here is only just the beginning of what kind of structures and forms we can write into our stories.

So, overall, I found Alison’s book an exciting and pleasant read, even with the length caveat. It certainly made me want to go away and think about my and others’ structuring decisions with a more architectural eye. And it also gave me a raft of new authors I might want to read. Really, in a book like this, that’s what success is all about.

Glaciers, Climate and Humility

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes describes the delight at the discovery of nature’s secrets that animated both artists and scientists around the time of the Romantics. Wonder, that sense of awe in the face of the mysterious and great, drove men and women to explore the world on ship and saddle and plumb its depths and farthest reaches. Few things were more exciting than glaciers, those vast marble-white creatures that sit at the tops of the world and lour down at us mortals beneath.

It was the investigation of glaciers that led to the discovery of the climate and its changes which are of vital importance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not until the late 20th century that fears began to focus on global warming rather than global cooling. Initially, it was these masses of ice who were our enemy, unpredictable beasts whose movement downwards was felt to be unstoppable and perfectly destructive. The cooling of the planet would decimate crop yields and lead to mass starvation and social unrest, and as late as the 1970s the CIA was preparing for such a potentiality.

We know now, of course, that the present problem we face lies not in cooling, but in heating. After first briefly looking at the history of our understanding of the climate, I briefly consider the relationship between the technological mastery of the earth and human nature.

It was a Genevan scientist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who set off the beginnings of our understanding of the climate towards the end of the 18th century. A committed Alpinist, in his Voyages dans les Alpes he first used the word geology but was puzzled by the question of why we did not freeze to death during the night. This seems slightly silly at first glance, but if you shuffle off your knowledge of modern science you can see it for the challenge it once was. When the source of most of our heat is clearly the sun, why does that heat not disappear the moment the sun sets in the evening? Saussure built a kind of mini greenhouse in the 1770s and thus discovered that the atmosphere itself is capable of holding heat long after its sources have been removed.

One problem was resolved, but others remained. In the 19th-century, people were interested in whether there had been an Ice Age at all – not just the posthumously christened “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 19th centuries – but an actual period of frozen wastes and mass starvation. This was proven by Louis Agassiz, another Swiss scientist with a passion for glaciers. In 1837, he suggested that there had indeed been an ice age, and the evidence was all around us – valleys, gorges, mountains, and so many boulders and stones thrown far from their homes. Agassiz evocatively termed glaciers “God’s great plough” for their work. For proposing that global temperatures had indeed been much lower, and for an extended period of time, Agassiz can be thought of as the founder of the idea of climate and its changes.

Finally, John Tyndall, a British scientist with a passion for the Alps, began investigating glaciers and their movements. Building upon the work of the others above, he realised that some gases, in particular carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) and water vapour, contributed to the greenhouse effect that Saussure had discovered. This was not enough to cause concern about a changing climate. It was only when the Swedish professor Svante Arrhenius began modelling the effects of changing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, reaching conclusions that are not too far from our modern models, that cause and effect were truly linked. Arrhenius himself was not worried. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he believed carbon dioxide concentrations were rising very slowly, and that it would take over three thousand years for figures to double. That was far enough down the road, and in any case, he held the view, not uncommon until relatively recently, that warming could only be a good thing – making the world more hospitable and increasing the yields of crops.

Of course, at the end of the 19th-century things were indeed so. This did not last. As the 20th century got underway the world only produced more and more carbon emissions from new inventions such as cars, the widespread electrification (on a coal power basis) of developed countries, and from a growing population that wanted to consume more and more. How exactly the world would change was still a subject of contention, rather than the consensus it is now, but there was no denying that the atmosphere was indeed changing. An American scientist, Charles David Keeling, created the famous Keeling Curve using data gathered at the Mauna Loa meteorological observatory in Hawaii (and then elsewhere too). This showed in unambiguous terms that the amount of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere was growing, and growing fast.

The Keeling Curve, courtesy of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The shocking thing, and the one that really gives those sceptics who claim that the climate has always changed (and it has, that is true) and that humans have nothing to do with it no legs to stand on, is when we consider the curve over a longer period, as below.
The uptick is quite extraordinary, going far beyond the natural cycles beforehand. And it shows no signs of stopping.

It is amusing to think that we once thought that the ice was our problem, but not without its symbolic interest. Imagine a man or woman, standing before a glacier. The difference in scale is extraordinary. Unlike mountains, which are relatively stationary and thus pose no threat except to climbers, and bodies of water, which can be fished and dammed and bridged, glaciers are a force of nature that seems completely unmasterable. (These scientists were mostly writing before Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867). If a glacier came, or if the temperature dropped, death would seem inevitable. Crops would fail, and cities would be swept away. And that would be it.

The damage from cooling is easy to visualise – just last year the world was rocked by images of French farmers, huddled around grape vines with torches, an almost medieval scene, as they tried to prevent a cold snap from destroying their harvest. But such images also reveal the problem with this great fear of cooling – it is so clearly remediable by heating. Houses could be insulated even in the 19th century, trees could be chopped for firewood, coal could be burned, and warmer clothes could be worn. If one were really being chased by glaciers, then of course a couple of (hundred thousand) sticks of dynamite could be used to break up the beasts and let what sun remained work upon them more effectively.

This fear of cooling reflects, we can say, the legacy of a pre-Enlightenment view of humanity, one where we were small and vulnerable to the world and God’s whimsy. The Enlightenment was not just a time of new knowledge, it was also a time of new mastery and power over nature, individuals, and whole societies. Glaciers appeared as something that, in spite of our advances, remained frightening and uncontrollable – an uncanny reminder that we were not as great as we thought we were. A kind of living white injunction to be humbler. But then we kept advancing, and soon we no longer feared even them. Human arrogance had won out. The kind of arrogance that was the darkest legacy of the Enlightenment because it allowed us to commit the terrible social experiments of the 20th century (Stalinism, fascism, and so on), convinced us that we not only had the might but also the right, to change the world.

In the case of the climate, we really could have benefited from learning our lesson in humility the first time around. The world is warming rapidly, the human and other animal toll is likely to be massive and, worst of all, entirely avoidable. But unlike with battling glaciers, where one is not a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but actually capable of fighting back effectively, we cannot so easily deal with heating. Fire brings warmth, but what takes it away? Even if you have the answer, it comes to mind far less readily than fire does to the question of creating warmth. We can take our clothes off, but public decency demands we exercise this ability within certain limits, and in any case, there are only so many clothes we can take off before we need to look at other options.

Fridges and air conditioners are not the solutions they may seem to be. Both of them actually worsen the problem because of their own chemical and electricity demands, which leads to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even beyond that technical point, both fridges and air conditioners cool a small area, and an enclosed one. Hold the fridge door open and open all your windows and the cooling effects are so much reduced as to be essentially imperceptible. A fire might work the same way, but it heats much more effectively than these objects cool. And in terms of fuels, a fire can eat anything, whereas these things require electricity, which is comparatively complex to produce.  

Pretty much everything in the world is about heating. We heat oil to distillate it into its component parts, which we then heat to make our internal combustion engines work, build new chemicals, or power our power plants. We heat our food before we eat it, we heat our homes, and the production of the dyes we use in everything around us is dependent on heat too. Plastic is basically the result of heating certain chemical compounds to certain temperatures. The same is true of metals. How do you go from iron to steel? The answer, with some intervening steps, is heat.

Even when heating is not the primary factor, heat is the waste product. A gas-fired power plant heats water to produce steam, which puts a turbine into motion, generating electricity. What is left over is that heat. The smashing of mined ore that is part of its processing also produces heat. Within the home, our devices heat up when we use them too much. I am currently balancing my computer on a book so that it does not heat my lap. And speaking of my lap, the human body provides us with another example of heat’s omniprevalence. We heat up as we think, exercise, in a word live, and then lose that heat through things like sweating.

A glacier is an easy example of a cooling climate, the bad guy to be fought. When the climate warms, there is no such enemy coming. Instead, things just die. Deserts grow, plants don’t, natural disasters like hurricanes increase in frequency, and bad weather events like snowstorms and heat waves do too, but in all of these cases we are dealing with something essentially diffuse and impersonal. The problem cannot be dynamited away. And because it is a global problem, it is not as if we could just throw down a fridge and be done with it. Being a global problem, it is harder to accept it as our particular problem. A growing glacier is a specific issue for a specific place, while a shrinking glacier is a general loss, but because of its generality, we end up being only able to care so much about it.

This psychological issue is perhaps the main reason why so few people do any of the things that we can do to reduce global warming. (The complicating issue, one beyond the scope of this piece, is about whether individuals or corporations should be more responsible for emissions). Fire and heat are both easier to arrange than things to cool, they also have a more obvious effect with their burning. Likewise, the delayed effect of climate change, where today we are seeing the consequences of emissions released into the atmosphere quite literally before I was born, means that there’s an element of resignation in dealing with global warming which means that some people may simply not bother doing what they can.

I noted that at the time when people feared the return of the glaciers, they had every reason to do so, being comparatively less able to fight them off. Technological change prevailed, and the Enlightenment dream of power over all things was allowed to continue. Humans need to learn humility, but I doubt climate change is going to teach them it. Some of the most promising developments in fighting against carbon dioxide overproduction are likely to have the effect of letting us “off the hook” for our failure to reduce our consumption earlier. I have in mind technologies such as those for direct air capture, essentially giant reverse air conditioning units that suck carbon out of the air at immense cost and electricity demand, or perhaps nuclear fusion, which was in the news earlier this month.  

Of course, the alternative to being let off the hook – and I should be clear that these technologies are unlikely to save us, only compensate somewhat for our utter inability to do anything about reducing our demand for fossil fuels – is to watch our world disintegrate in fire and brimstone, metaphorically speaking and literally too in some places. A loss of diversity, a loss of nature, a loss of human life in the developing world, in particular, all of this is a catastrophe, even if it’s not “the end of the world”, only the end of “our world.” None of us wishes to see that either.

What then will change us? What then will bring humility? What then will lead a majority of us to take actions to build a better world, rather than continue statically upon the destructive paths that others have laid for us? I wish I knew. The world is a wondrous place, but wonder has not done enough, nor even has fear. Time will tell, I hope, what thing truly is needful. The alternative is not encouraging to think about.

This post was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, and the information on the scientists comes primarily from it.