The Anthropocene Reviewed(66)

But that doesn’t mean your layer of paint is irrelevant or a failure. You have permanently, if slightly, changed the larger sphere. You’ve made it more beautiful, and more interesting. The world’s largest ball of paint looks nothing like the baseball it used to be, and you’re part of the reason.

In the end, that’s what art is for me. You paint the ball, which changes the way someone else thinks about painting the ball, and so on, until some guy overwhelmed with grief and dread drives out to Alexandria, Indiana, to see what beautiful foolishness thousands of people have made together, and feels a hope that cannot be explained or shared except by painting. That guy adds a layer of his own to the ball, one that won’t last but still matters. Art is not only a genius going forth, as James Joyce put it, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway.

I give the world’s largest ball of paint four stars.





SYCAMORE TREES



MY CHILDREN LIKE TO PLAY an age-old game with me called Why? I’ll tell them, for instance, that I need them to finish breakfast, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say so that you receive adequate nutrition and hydration, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because as your parent I feel obligated to protect your health, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say partly because I love you and partly because of evolutionary imperatives baked into my biology, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because the species wants to go on, and they’ll say, “Why?”

And I’ll pause for a long time before saying, “I don’t know. I guess I believe, in spite of it all, that the human enterprise has value.”

And then there will be a silence. A blessed and beautiful silence will spread across the breakfast table. I might even see a kid pick up a fork. And then, just as the silence seems ready to take off its coat and stay awhile, one of my kids will say, “Why?”



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When I was a teenager, I used the why game as a way of establishing that if you dig deep enough, there is no why. I reveled in nihilism. More than that, I liked being certain about it. Certain that everyone who believed life had inherent meaning was an idiot. Certain that meaning is just a lie we tell ourselves to survive the pain of meaninglessness.



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A while back, my brain started playing a game similar to the why game. This one is called What’s Even the Point.

There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I’ve quoted in two of my novels and will now quote again, because I’ve never come across anything that describes my depressive blizzards so perfectly. “That chill is in the air,” the poem begins, “Which the wise know well, and have even learned to bear. This joy, I know, Will soon be under snow.”

I’m in an airport in late 2018 when suddenly I feel that chill in the air. What’s even the point? I’m about to fly to Milwaukee on a Tuesday afternoon, about to herd with other moderately intelligent apes into a tube that will spew a truly astonishing amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in order to transport us from one population center to a different one. Nothing that anyone has to do in Milwaukee really matters, because nothing really matters.

When my mind starts playing What’s Even the Point, I can’t find a point to making art, which is just using the finite resources of our planet to decorate. I can’t find a point to planting gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that will sustain our useless vessels for a little while longer. And I can’t find a point to falling in love, which is just a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never truly solve for, because you are always alone “way down in the dark which is you,” as Robert Penn Warren put it.

Except it’s not a darkness. It’s much worse than that. When my brain plays What’s Even the Point, what actually descends upon me is a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. Being in the dark doesn’t hurt, but this does, like staring at the sun. That Millay poem refers to “the eye’s bright trouble.” It seems to me that the bright trouble is the light you see the first time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first tears, the light that is your first fear.

What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing, and soon. Sitting in the airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses, my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from the materials of this meaningless world. I’ve been tricking myself, thinking there was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle when it’s really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it’s really a terror. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here.

“Night falls fast,” Millay wrote. “Today is in the past.”



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The thing about this game is that once my brain starts playing it, I can’t find a way to stop. Any earnest defense I try to mount is destroyed instantaneously by the searing white light, and I feel like the only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it. If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool. When my brain is playing What’s Even the Point, hope feels so flimsy and na?ve—especially in the face of the endless outrages and horrors of human life. What kind of mouth-breathing jackass looks at the state of human experience and responds with anything other than absolute despair?