What to Read in the Face of Disaster
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Violence and strife feel unavoidable these days. When we’re not encountering them personally, we see them on our phone or in the news. Even the entertainment that offers an escape from daily struggles is full of it: On reality TV, people constantly fight; spicy “romantasy” novels abound in peril and heartbreak; comfort-food police procedurals revolve around horrific crimes. During especially difficult times, where can people turn when they want to ward off the threat of paralyzing despair? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially in light of two recent Atlantic stories: my colleague Gal Beckerman’s essay on the philosophy of pessimism and Carolina A. Miranda’s reflection on what to read as wildfires burn in her hometown of Los Angeles. Can any writer, Miranda wonders, offer useful wisdom when entire neighborhoods are destroyed in hours and ash rains over a metropolis?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- There’s a new language sheriff in town.
- “The Millworker’s Wife”: a poem for Sunday
- Where Han Kang’s nightmares come from
Social-media commentators have tried looking for solace in the work of L.A. essayists such as Joan Didion and Mike Davis. Miranda is an admirer of Davis, whose controversial 1995 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” argued that building housing on hillsides prone to natural cycles of fire had set Southern California up for disaster. Davis’s observations about suburban sprawl and potential solutions (such as the prescribed burns long practiced by Native tribes) made sense of the terrifying randomness of what was leveled and what remained unscathed. Yet the magnitude of this month’s fires—as well as the role of climate change in accelerating them—extend far beyond what Davis could have foreseen three decades ago. To understand the state of fire in 2025, Miranda recommends The Pyrocene, in which the historian Stephen J. Pyne defines wildfires as a truly global phenomenon. “In Southern California, we are currently feeling the burn,” Miranda concludes, “but the fire is everywhere.”
This is hardly a consoling thought: Spending time really absorbing the scale of calamity that climate change will cause in the coming years can easily lead to despondency. Beckerman’s essay addresses exactly this reaction. He writes about a new book, Hopeful Pessimism, in which the philosophy professor Mara van der Lugt “hopes to articulate a philosophical outlook for climate-change activists—a cohort with seemingly every reason to despair.” Van der Lugt argues that pessimism might be a better attitude toward environmental collapse than optimism, which leads to a false sense of safety. Pessimism, combined with hope, can spur more people to action. This is not an oxymoronic combination, Beckerman finds—so long as it is “built not on an expectation of what will happen in the future but instead on uncertainty.” Things will probably end badly, but they might not. “Just as despair can feel like stumbling through a pitch-black cave without an idea of where it ends,” Beckerman writes, “hopeful pessimism has the quality of being stranded on a deserted island yet bolstered by the ocean’s infinite blue.”
Promise, in this formulation, springs from the fact that the future is not yet written, as well as the enticing mystery of what it might look like. Last week, we learned of the death of David Lynch, one of the most gloriously mysterious filmmakers of his generation. (He died of complications from emphysema not long after one of the L.A. fires forced him to evacuate his home in the Hollywood Hills.) Lynch’s stories are full of dark undercurrents: murder, abuse, nuclear devastation, evil that reaches up from the depths of the human subconscious. Yet what makes his work most intriguing and enduring, as Emma Stefansky noted in an Atlantic essay this week, is that he tended to withhold tidy conclusions. In doing so, Stefansky writes, “Lynch seemed to be imploring [viewers] to stop seeking clarity” and instead to embrace “the experience itself … the uncanny images whose significance were difficult to parse yet impossible to forget.” For as long as a puzzle goes unsolved, we get to imagine an ending that has not yet come to pass—perhaps even a positive one. That looks a lot like hope.
Be Like Sisyphus
By Gal Beckerman
How to embrace hopeful pessimism in a moment of despair
The ‘Dark Prophet’ of L.A. Wasn’t Dark Enough
By Carolina A. Miranda
As fires have raged, so have citations of the prescient author Mike Davis. But in a changed world, we need new thinkers too.
What to Read
The Half Life of Valery K, by Natasha Pulley
From its first pages, The Half Life of Valery K gets to the core of what humans facing a seemingly hopeless situation must do to carry on. “The way to not sink into self-pity and despair—the way not to die—was to look forward to things,” Valery thinks. “Anything; the tinier the better, because then you were more likely to get it.” Incarcerated in a Siberian prison, he must stave off “the terrible docility that came before you gave up.” Valery is a Soviet biochemist specializing in radiation who gets transferred to City 40, ostensibly to study the effect of a nuclear accident the government has spun as a planned “experiment” on an ecosystem. Pulley’s novel is inspired by real events: In September 1957, an explosion in the Soviet Union spread radioactive material, causing mass evacuations and contamination. The book itself has sharp edges. Pulley’s characters are not only physically wounded; they are forever scarred by their trauma. But Valery, despite his lack of power in a despotic system, is able to help others, and finds a way to not just survive his pain but also live with its lasting effects. — Vanessa Armstrong
From our list: What to read when the odds are against you
Out Next Week
???? Too Soon, by Betty Shamieh
???? The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White
???? The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes
Your Weekend Read
The Myth of a Loneliness Epidemic
By Faith Hill
The greatest difficulty with measuring loneliness—and deciding how much to focus on ending it—may be that we don’t really know what loneliness is. Different people, researchers told me, seem to mean different things when they say they’re lonely: Some want more time with friends; some yearn to be seen for who they are; some feel disconnected from a collective identity or sense of purpose. What those experiences tell us about society’s ills—or whether they tell any coherent story at all—remains unclear. And if nations are going to devote precious resources to solving loneliness, they should know what it is they’re trying to fix.
A previous version of this newsletter included Adam Chandler's 99% Perspiration under "Out Next Week." The book was published on January 7.
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