when he died. He had around a year to live when he posed for that famous photograph. Anything might’ve happened, but one thing did.
I give Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance four and a half stars.
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.
* * *
Ever since we were kids, I’ve been asking my brother, Hank, to tell me the meaning of life. It’s a running joke with us—we’ll be talking about our lives and what to do with them, or about our families, or about work, and when there is a slight pause in the conversation, I’ll say, “What is the meaning of life, anyway?”
Hank always tailors his response to the conversation, or to what he thinks I might need to hear. Sometimes, he will tell me that caring for others is the meaning of life. Other times, he’ll say that we are here to bear witness, to pay attention. In a song he wrote years ago called “The Universe Is Weird,” Hank sings that the weirdest thing is that, in us, “the universe created a tool with which to know itself.”
He likes to remind me that I am made out of the materials of the universe, that I contain nothing but those materials. “Really,” he told me once, “you’re just a hunk of Earth trying to sustain a departure from chemical equilibrium.”
* * *
In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery writes:
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
It fits its hollow perfectly. Its room, our moment of attention. I whisper those words to myself sometimes, to try to call myself to attention, to notice the perfectly fitted hollows all around.
It occurs to me that this book is filled with quotes—maybe overfilled with them. I am also overfilled with quotes. For me, reading and rereading are an everlasting apprenticeship. I want to learn what Ashbery seemed to know: how to open the room of attention that contains the soul. I want to learn what my brother knows: how to make meaning, and what meaning to make. I want to learn what to do with my tiny expanse of the world’s largest ball of paint.
* * *
It is spring, finally, and I am planting carrot seeds in a long row. They’re so tiny that I can’t help but overplant, ten or twelve seeds for every inch of soil. I feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth.
“Fill the Earth and subdue it,” God tells us in the first chapter of Genesis. But we are also the Earth we are filling and subduing.
* * *
How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It is wondrous! In high school, my best friend, Todd, and I went to the dollar movie theater every Wednesday. We watched whatever movie was playing on the frigid theater’s single screen. Once, a werewolf movie starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer played at the theater for eight straight Wednesdays, so we watched it eight times. The movie, which was terrible, got better and better the more we watched it. By the eighth time, we were alone in the theater, and we howled with Jack Nicholson while we drank Mountain Dew spiked with bourbon.
How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It’s awful! I feel that I am not evolved for this. I have only been here a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining members of many other kinds—from birds like the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō, last seen when I was ten, to trees like the St. Helena olive, the last of which died when I was twenty-six.
“I smell the wound and it smells like me,” Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth.
What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of