My book, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, was released March 15. Recent events have made it more relevant than it was last year. A part of the book was dedicated to a sensibility that could face deep civilizational disruption and still stay sane—through humor, through seeing things clearly, and through kindness to the people in our lives. That is mostly what the book is about these days.
I’m starting a new “End Notes” blog, with plans to post new entries each Monday. I’m hoping that my blog will not become a Journal of the Plague Year, or even of the Plague Month, though I fear it will. Things could go back tomorrow to a disease-free state and we’d still be changed forever.
Regardless of what happens, I plan on reporting on what’s happening in this small world and what the much larger outside world looks like from this angle.
A shortened version of this inaugural End Notes blog entry was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books on March 22. The full version appears below.
Stay well,
John
On Having One’s Book Tour Cancelled by the Coronavirus Outbreak
This is not quite what I meant at all.
On March 15, 2020, the University of New Mexico Press released my A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, a collection of essays contemplating the collapse of industrial civilization. In the introduction to the book, I state that no one can predict the future. It’s getting hard enough to predict the present, I write, before launching into meditations on an unsustainable status quo.
The Press and I had planned a book tour in the American Southwest to introduce the book to independent bookstore owners, book clubs, and university philosophy and environmental science departments.
Then came coronavirus. A few days before the book tour was to begin, schools and colleges closed. Bookstores cancelled readings. The AWP convention in San Antonio, where advance reader copies of my book had occupied a table in the UNM Press booth, had gone ahead on schedule—at the price of halved attendance, cancelled presentations, and the resignation of one of its co-directors, who had wanted to call the whole thing off.
The tour for my end-of-world book ended before it started, because of the end of a small and quite particular world, one inhabited by convivial book-lovers, environmental seminar students, wine-fueled discussion groups, and ordinary people looking for an ethical alternative to fighting over toilet paper in Walmart.
My book was aimed at this disparate audience, although I hadn’t anticipated the toilet paper fights, preferring instead to focus on cannibalism and arsenals in basements.
I live in the middle of Idaho, in a high snow-covered valley, and although my spouse Julie and I hadn’t spent the winter quarantined, it felt like we had. We were looking forward to cloudless skies, warm sunshine, and audiences prepared to laugh at doomsday jokes. I had written a funny-but-dark End Times book, which isn’t a well-known genre, but it seemed to be appropriate for a world getting more and more absurd and risky. I had also dealt—more seriously—with the grief that would attend the end of civilization. When we realized the book tour wasn’t going to happen, we got a glimpse of that grief.
At least until we realized we were being stupidly self-indulgent, and that most people in the world had worse problems, lots of them lethal or worse, and that quarantine, at least for a month or two, was going to look quite a lot like business as usual for us. We are backcountry skiing in the days, reading by the woodstove once it gets dark, and keeping track of a pandemic from a distance—at least as much distance as a pandemic will allow. We’ve just received news of a COVID-19 victim in Sun Valley, fifty miles south of us, where daily flights from Seattle began early last December and had continued through President’s Day Weekend.
So we’re waiting, along with everyone else in the country, until this thing that has divided our lives into Before and After begins to reveal its nature. Thus far we’ve got enough food in the pantry to last us for a couple of weeks, and shelves and shelves of books, and a suddenly interesting CD collection that we haven’t played through since the invention of Internet streaming. We’ve assured the dog we’re not going to eat her, at least just yet, although she hasn’t made the same promise back to us.
I’ve realized, as well, that the audience for my book has increased exponentially, even if the word is going to take a while to get out. It’s a book that explores the question of living well in tough times, behaving ethically in the face of deprivation and rage, and finding meaning in the small spaces of our lives. It’s a kind of nano-survivalism manual, and while it lacks the grim heft of an assault rifle and a crawl space packed with freeze-dried food, it delivers the promise that while there is life, there can be meaning, and it suggests ways to glean that meaning from a picked-over world.
II
You get a good idea of the value of your own advice when you have to apply it to your own existence. My coronavirus-aware-self understands that my recipes for the good life now have a life-and-death intensity to them, and that some of my jokes flirt dangerously with nihilism, which is hard on morale in any arena where theory becomes practice.
That’s not to say my book and I have lost credibility. We’ve gained it. Not without a tradeoff.
My book was once able to guarantee my readers a conditional existence, cover to cover. I wrote it as a refugee from fragility rather than collapse, and that turned out to be a happy distinction. Now that distinction is in danger of disappearing. The scary stories I told around the campfire have a new audience, one made up of the aged, the immune-challenged, the diabetic, the asthmatic, the breathless.
III
A cancelled book tour creates a hole in time. Time itself, which once was divided into units of human agency, tends toward eternity, where human agency is a dad-joke at best.
You do what you can to fill the eternal spaces on the calendar. Cancelling hotel reservations becomes the occasion for sudden small friendships with the person who answers the phone, who tells you of other cancelled reservations, empty dining rooms and streets, and closed libraries. You promise to come back when this is over, realizing only after you’ve ended the call that you haven’t been there yet.
You resort to ritual. Ritual is the way we humans get a handle on eternity. In this neighborhood it takes the form of home maintenance.
You go outside, to check on the patches of lawn emerging from the snow, and decide you’ll start raking up the pine needles early this year. The house needs stained. The lower branches of trees need trimmed prior to fire season. The deck, made uneven by frost heaves, needs you to crawl around under it and shorten its pilings with a battery-powered chainsaw, an activity you call deck-yoga. You wonder how long batteries will last in a world that might not be producing them in a year. You decide—trying to stand up straight after a session in the under-deck mud—that they’ll last longer than you will.
The desk gets organized and cleaned. The scarred wall behind the woodbox gets repainted. The emergency food in the crawl space gets inventoried, and you decide it will last at least as long as your book tour was supposed to. You spend a half-day fixing electrical issues in the old SUV with the help of your automotive partner, Mr. YouTube. You wish you’d fixed things two years earlier, when the rear window and locks had quit working in the first place. A friend calls and tells you his broadband has been out for three days. You wonder how long Mr. YouTube will last.
You check on older friends, by phone. You have better conversations than you’ve had in years.
Books. There are a thousand or more in the house. It was a shock when you realized that you had more books than you could read in your life, a bigger shock when you realize coronavirus could shorten that life further.
You read articles in which authors recommend books that first awakened wonder and joy in their lives. They’re going back to those books these days, finding strength in their vanished worlds and familial comfort.
It doesn’t work that way with you. And yet, by looking at the titles that jump out at you from the bookcase, you come up with a classic reading list to fill those lost evenings when you would have read end-of-the-world passages to hopeful and good-willed young people. Here it is—you don’t list their authors because their book tours have been cancelled, too:
Ozymandias
The Masque of the Red Death
The Second Coming
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland
Moby Dick
The Sun Also Rises
The Plague
Lolita
Denial of Death
The Wikipedia entry on Nietzsche
These will keep your mind off your troubles for a while.
You hesitate about listing a Wikipedia entry as a classic, but understand that it’s safer than reading Nietzsche in the flesh, in the same way that Nietzsche must have found it safer to talk about the Abyss as a metaphor rather than see it as a screaming horse being beaten to death in real time.
The coronavirus isn’t a metaphor. It’s a microbe. It’s not safe either.
You don’t put A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World on the reading list because at this point in the publishing process, you really don’t want to read it again. And it’s not a metaphor either.
IV
The first book I’ve started reading is The Plague. I’ve read it a half-dozen times, because I used to teach it to undergraduates, especially undergraduates deeply infatuated with French postmodernists. I used to tell my students that the French writers who came after Camus were reduced to inarticulate, incomprehensible, untranslatable rage because they weren’t Camus. It wasn’t the Anxiety of Influence they were dealing with. When you come after Camus, you suffer from the Post Traumatic Stress of Influence.
The Plague is not about the Nazis. It’s not about facing Evil. It’s not even about getting the first sentence of your novel right. It’s about being a doctor in a city where a communicable disease is killing the people around you, and doing what little you can to fight it. That’s the deep hidden meaning of The Plague, except it’s not hidden.
Camus helps reassure me that the coronavirus is a literal thing. We live in an enormously screwed-up world because people seize on the literal and turn it into metaphor, and then turn around and start treating the metaphor as though it were literal. That’s one of the reasons a horrible emptiness lurks on supermarket shelves where toilet paper used to be, or in your month-old portfolio statement from a few days before you were going to cash out but didn’t. Stop turning those things into metaphor and you’ll find you probably have enough toilet paper and enough money to live until you find enough of both to go on a little longer, and so on.
So economic systems are not really giant animals that die when they quit breathing. A virus is not a sentient being. Cigars are just cigars and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex is just a simple criminal enterprise, not Satan. Feckless government officials are not really the Deep State. The virus is not God’s Wrath or evidence that we need to Vaccinate America Against Illegal Aliens.
As the pandemic widens, we are going to experience grief we didn’t know we were capable of, but we will find strengths we didn’t know we had. With luck these strengths will let us reject the metaphors that have transformed a communicable microbe into something that can destroy economies, abrogate treaties and contracts, move people to divide humanity into Them and Us, and cause people to wake up in the middle of the night in paralyzing fear. Metaphors endure until they’re seen through. Pandemics have beginnings and ends that require more action. We will, with luck and wisdom, carry on.
Here’s my nano-survival advice: Be nice to the people you’re trapped indoors with. Inoculate yourself against metaphors. Read The Plague as a self-help manual. And don’t get too upset if your book tour is cancelled. It’s not the end of the world.