Bookshelf

🎨 Impressions

I’ve been a long-time follower of John Green’s work, starting with his very early history lessons on his YouTube channel “Crash Course.” It was all brilliant, I thought. Created with such a loving eye for the details and visible enjoyment of the process. The many other projects he did, often together with his equally brilliant brother Hank, were nearly always a hit, at least in my opinion. I didn’t read his books though, because those used to be young adult novels—not really my cup of tea—but I’ve heard them described to be amazing, too. Fun side note, Taylor Swift apparently said at one of her recent huge arena concerts attended by Green that she was happy her favorite author was among the guests today. Described by John Green, the announcement happened right when his kids and wife were at the restrooms, so he missed his chance to be the coolest dad ever to them. Tough luck!

Not that long ago then, Green published a non-fiction book called “Everything is Tuberculosis,” aimed at spreading the word that the current world’s most deadliest disease is totally curable if we just decided to redistribute the global wealth ever so slightly to where it’s needed. This has been a philanthropic project of his for a while, and using his platform to that effect makes him an even cooler person in my regard. And, despite the fact that this is a book about a disease, it sure enough became a big bestseller. It doesn’t seem to matter what topic Green addresses and what style he uses to do so, it will become great.

And this book did not disappoint as well. The Anthropocene Reviewed is just wonderful. Insightful, emotional, informative, entertaining, everything. The origin of it was a collection of essays he recorded as podcast episodes, before compiling them all into this book, as far as I understand. The idea being that he would take one singular topic that highlights a specific topic of what it means to be a human living in our current era, explain it from his perspective, make interesting connections and put it into a light that will make you aware of all the rough edges of it, before closing the essay with attaching to it between one and five stars, just like you would give a restaurant on Google Maps. This suggests it’s a fun and light read, and it is at times, but parts of it are so gripping I was near tears. It inevitably becomes a type of autobiography of his, with all the ups and downs which he is comfortable sharing, and that includes his struggles with depression. It’s so rare someone can talk about that without it being a drag, but also without it ending like a Hollywood movie with the perfect cure, but instead with the reality of how a human person lives with it. In that sense the book is a celebration of our vulnerability, but also of our resilience.

The ratio between fun easy-going and deeply emotional is just perfect in this book. It seems to me there’s a similarity of that ratio to the one we as humans experience in our realities.

Reading this book made me happy to be a human and happy to be alive right now. Especially after those two books I’ve read recently, which dealt with a possible scenario for how Nuclear War could play out, and how a superhuman artificial intelligence could realistically kill us all quite soon, respectively. It was those books that made me decide to finally pick this here from my list, and it came at the exact right time. I give the Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.

📔 Highlights

Introduction

As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

“For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That’s pretty much all the info u need.”

We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.

We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

You’ll Never Walk Alone

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is cheesy, but it’s not wrong. The song doesn’t claim the world is a just or happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hope in our hearts.

Humanity’s Temporal Range

“Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”

The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.

We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we choose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.

But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth’s greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.

We’re the only part of the known universe that knows it’s in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We’re the only species that knows it has a temporal range.

These days, I choose to believe that our persistence and our adaptability will allow us to keep changing with the universe for a very, very long time.

Halley’s Comet

Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986. It’ll be brighter in the night sky than Jupiter, or any star.

In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.

Our Capacity for Wonder

It is, after all, a book about hearkening back to a past that never existed, trying to fix some single moment from the past into permanence, when the past is neither fixed nor fixable.

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

Diet Dr Pepper

I’ve always felt like I need a vice. I don’t know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit.

The pleasure of smoking for me wasn’t about a buzz; the pleasure came from the jolt of giving in to an unhealthy physical craving, which over time increased my physical cravings, which in turn increased the pleasure of giving in to them.

Teddy Bears

She’s not afraid of polar bears; she’s afraid of their extinction. The animals that once terrorized us, and that we long terrorized, are now often viewed as weak and vulnerable.

Staphylococcus aureus

I remember as a child hearing phrases like “Only the strong survive” and “survival of the fittest” and feeling terrified, because I knew I was neither strong nor fit. I didn’t yet understand that when humanity protects the frail among us, and works to ensure their survival, the human project as a whole gets stronger.

Academic Decathlon

I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential,” in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t actually have that much potential.

Piggly Wiggly

The mighty pulse of the throbbing today does make new things out of old—but it also makes old things out of new.

The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the “just” of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.

Harvey

Susan Sontag wrote that “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”

He showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved.

The Yips

This complicated interplay between the so-called physical and the so-called psychological reminds us that the mind/body dichotomy isn’t overly simplistic; it’s complete bullshit. The body is always deciding what the brain will think about, and the brain is all the time deciding what the body will do and feel. Our brains are made out of meat, and our bodies experience thoughts.

Googling Strangers

It’s horrifying, how much information can be accessed via Google about almost all of us. Of course, this loss of privacy has come with tremendous benefits—free storage of photos and video, a chance to participate in large-scale discourse via social media, and the opportunity to easily keep in touch with friends from long ago.

Indianapolis

The problem was never 86th and Ditch, which turns out to be a great American intersection. The problem was me. And after Chris called my assumptions into question, I began to think differently about the city.

The Indianapolis 500

I don’t like crowds, but I like this crowd, because I’m in an us that doesn’t require a them.

Monopoly

Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then becomes distressingly fast at the end.

Super Mario Kart

Some might argue that games should reward talent and skill and hard work precisely because real life doesn’t. But to me the real fairness is when everyone has a shot to win, even if their hands are small, even if they haven’t been playing the game since 1992.

Bonneville Salt Flats

I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.

Hiroyuki Doi’s Circle Drawings

I know we’ve left scars everywhere, and that our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.

Plague

That is a human story. It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them.

The residents of Damascus left us a model for how to live in this precedented now. As the poet Robert Frost put it, “The only way out is through.” And the only good way through is together. Even when circumstances separate us—in fact, especially when they do—the way through is together.

The QWERTY Keyboard

Of course, among the interesting things about Edison is that he did not invent either the light bulb or the motion picture camera. In both cases, Edison worked with collaborators to build upon existing inventions, which is one of the human superpowers.

What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

They are reminders that I, too, would in time be surprised by history, and that a picture, though static, keeps changing as its viewers change. As Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Postscript

THE GERMAN TRANSLATION OF THIS BOOK is called Wie hat Ihnen das Anthropozän bis jetzt gefallen? I can’t read German, but I find that title wonderful just to look at. I’m told it translates to something like How Have You Enjoyed the Anthropocene So Far? How, indeed.

Post-Postscript

Almost everything turns out to be interesting if you pay the right kind of attention to it.

The Orbital Sunrise

For me, art is a kind of landing site in the wilderness. Art is where I go when I do not know where else to go. Art can help me to see what I will never see— not just orbital sunrises but the way- down stuff too abstract and nebulous to have a name. Through art, paradoxes of consciousness resolve for me.

The Ginkgo Tree

I’ve spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn’t for anything, that it doesn’t mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the ginkgo tree, I’m able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here— that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know.