The Anthropocene Reviewed(35)

But mostly, we had one another. That apartment—the walls all painted very bright colors, no sound insulation, only one bathroom, tiny bedrooms, huge common areas—was designed for us to be in it together, to be in every part of life together. And we were. We loved one another with a ferocity that unnerved outsiders. I once went on a few dates with someone who told me one night that my friend group seemed like a cult. When I told Shannon and Katie and Hassan about this, we all agreed that I needed to break off the relationship immediately.

“But that’s what we would say if we were a cult,” Katie said.

Hassan nodded, and deadpanned, “Oh, shit, guys. We’re a cult.”

I know I am romanticizing this past—we also had huge fights, we had our hearts broken, we got too drunk and fought over who would get to puke into the one toilet, etc.—but it was the first extended period of my adult life when I felt okay even some of the time, and so you’ll forgive me if I recall it with such fondness.

That August, I turned twenty-six, and we threw a dinner party called “John Green Has Outlived John Keats,” and everybody who attended read some poetry. Someone read Edna St. Vincent Millay:


My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!



A few days later, the owners of the building told us they were selling it. But even if they hadn’t, the apartment would’ve split up eventually. The big forces of human life—marriage, careers, immigration policy—were pulling us in different directions. But our candle gave a lovely light.



* * *





We were living in that apartment during the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hassan grew up in Kuwait, and he had family members living in Iraq at the time. For a few weeks after the invasion, he didn’t hear from them. He would eventually learn they were okay, but it was a scary time, and one of the ways he coped was by watching cable news almost all the time. And because we only had one TV, and we were constantly together, that meant the rest of us watched a lot of cable news as well.

Even though the war was covered twenty-four hours a day, very little background information ever entered the picture. The news talked a fair amount about the relationship between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, for instance, but never paused to explain the theological differences between Shias and Sunnis, or the history of Iraq, or the political ideology of the Baathist movement. There was so much news—news that was forever breaking—that there was never time for context.

One evening, just after the U.S.-led forces entered Baghdad, we were all watching the news on the couch together. Unedited footage was being broadcast from the city, and we watched as a cameraman panned across a home with a huge hole in one of its walls that was mostly covered by a piece of plywood. There was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spray paint on the plywood, and the reporter on the news was talking about the anger in the street, and the hatred. Hassan started to laugh.

I asked him what was so funny, and he said, “The graffiti.”

And I said, “What’s funny about it?”

Hassan answered, “It says ‘Happy birthday, sir, despite the circumstances.’”



* * *





On a minute-by-minute basis, it’s hard for any of us to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility. I project my expectations and fears onto everyone and everything I encounter. I believe that what I believe to be true must be true because I believe it. I imagine lives that feel distant from mine monolithically. I oversimplify. I forget that everyone has birthdays.

Good journalism seeks to correct for those biases, to help us toward a deeper understanding of the universe and our place in it. But when we can’t read the writing on the plywood but still think we know what it says, we are spreading ignorance and bigotry, not the peace and friendship Turner promised.

I give CNN two stars.





HARVEY



THE MOVIE HARVEY stars Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, an alcoholic whose best friend is a six-foot, three-and-a-half-inch-tall invisible white rabbit named Harvey. Josephine Hull won an Oscar for her portrayal of Elwood’s sister, Veta, who struggles with whether to commit Elwood to a sanitarium. The film, based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play of the same name, was an immediate critical and commercial success when it was released in 1950.*

But my story of Harvey begins in the early winter of 2001, shortly after I suffered what used to be known as a nervous breakdown. I was working for Booklist magazine and living on the Near North Side of Chicago in a small apartment that I had until recently shared with a person I’d thought I would marry. At the time, I believed that our breakup had caused my depression, but now I see that my depression at least in part caused the breakup. Regardless, I was alone, in what had been our apartment, surrounded by what had been our things, trying to take care of what had been our cat.

Susan Sontag wrote that “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” For me, living with depression was at once utterly boring and absolutely excruciating. Psychic pain overwhelmed me, consuming my thoughts so thoroughly that I no longer had any thoughts, only pain. In Darkness Visible, William Styron’s wrenching memoir of depression, he wrote, “What makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.” I find hopelessness to be a kind of pain. One of the worst kinds. For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.