Life, death, and Herodotus
I received my contract from Chicago just a few weeks after my first child was born. My wife and I had moved across the country for the birth. She grew up in southern California so we chose Laguna Beach for its gorgeous location and proximity to friends and family. I finished the semester at Bryn Mawr and then joined her for a few weeks before the due date. Our son arrived on New Year’s Eve.
The first few months were a challenge and a joy beyond imagination. The radical rupture in our routines felt less significant than the swelling of emotion. I was suddenly growing larger. Listening to a broadcast of the Philadelphia Orchestra, tears streaked my cheeks and splashed dark gray on my son’s white swaddle. That he could experience this beautiful world, that he could share Chopin and surfing and the fields of lupines that waved from the hillsides a few months into his life – this was all so much, too much, completely overwhelming.
I wept too when I read reports published early that year about radical species decline. The Anthropocene felt even more urgent when I considered it with my son in my arms. There would be half as many non-human animals in his world as mine. Billions more chicken bones. Insects that I swatted away as a boy buzzed no longer. Songbirds that awakened me had fallen silent. This wasn’t just polar bears and elephants. It was everything, everything but us, the destructive force sweeping and annihilating life itself.
Living in Orange County, even a gorgeous corner like Laguna Beach, did not improve my regard for humanity. Why were we killing all life for the sake of enormous houses and more stuff and cars than we possibly needed? I’d never seen so many Bentleys, Rolls Royces, and Lamborghinis, not to mention Porsches and Ferraris and Maseratis. Two-bedroom beach shacks were priced in the millions. The once bohemian enclave has been overtaken by wealth like a plague of locusts, scraping every unprotected inch clean to lay deep concrete foundations.
We still loved Laguna Beach, especially on quiet weekday mornings when I strapped our son to my chest and we walked along the sea or when I soaked him with my sweat hiking to an overlook on Guna Peak, where you could survey the sweep of coast up to Long Beach, along Catalina and San Clemente, and down toward San Diego. Our rental cottage did not have room for a study, so I set up a desk atop a low dresser, sitting sideways in a chair while I entered revisions to my manuscript on my laptop. Or I walked over to the Laguna Public Library, where if I arrived early enough I could snag a table in front of a large picture window with a view of guano-white Bird Rock at the northern edge of Main Beach, the portrait framed with lolling Indian laurel fig trees, tall and slender like the Californians sunning themselves on the sand below.
The Anthropocene named the time from which I was reading and thinking. It named this moment of human beings coming to terms with their outsized influence, mostly destructive, on the world around them. It evoked the feeling of despair and revolution that often overcame me when I considered how much was being ground underfoot for so little. What were we doing here? What kind of life was possible in such a world? What life awaited my innocent son?
David Wallace Wells asks some of these questions at the end of his frightening and powerful book on climate change. He also considers the world his child will inherit, the loneliness of an earth completely devastated by human civilization. They will be difficult times – impaired by pollution, bereft of non-human companions, mired in wars for dwindling, non-renewable resources. They already are difficult times. But they will also be interesting times – surprising, unpredictable, perhaps even open for shifts in how we live our lives. Herodotus felt useful, even fruitful, for this world. In his stories, human beings were not deluded about their place in the world – or if they were, they suffered the consequences of their excesses. Herodotus himself illustrated an alternative to the grasping for power and control in the form of his responsive and attentive inquiry, the practice underlying his Histories.
One of the greatest pleasures of my son’s arrival was watching Sarah and her mother connect as mothers. Sarah’s work overseas had distanced her from her mother who, in many ways, was a normal Midwesterner befuddled by the cosmopolitan and high-powered daughter she had raised. But Sarah’s becoming a mother lifted a curtain between them. They could speak to each other. They noticed the same behaviors and tastes and fascinating quiddities in our son. Her mother loved being in California with us and we loved her presence in our little family. She would play with our son for hours, disappearing into a bedroom until we began to wonder where they were. She brought bags of toys, hand knit caps and sweaters, mobiles to hang above the baby, and snacks for us.
Our life together began to take imaginable form. I was about to start a research sabbatical during which we planned to live in Seattle. Sarah’s mother would join us there while she prepared her house in Michigan for a move. After the sabbatical we would all live together in the Philadelphia area, near Bryn Mawr. Sarah would raise our children with their doting grandmother always there; her mother would have the support and presence of daughter and son-in-law as she aged. We all began to speak excitedly about our intergenerational family.
Two weeks after we had moved to Seattle, I awoke wondering why our son had not yet stirred. I reached for my phone to check the time and saw missed calls from strange numbers as well as from my parents. They had left voicemails. I scanned the broken transcriptions and saw mention of Sarah’s mother and a fall and the hospital. I awoke Sarah, who checked her phone and called one number back. Within minutes we were gasping and weeping. Her mother had died. Fallen down a flight of steps from a tour bus and hit her head. Disappeared from the world after a day touring Disneyland with a group of Upward Bound graduates.
The copyedits of my Herodotus manuscript arrived a few days later. I had two weeks to finalize the book. I felt like I’d been laid across a set of train tracks. Freight train after freight train ran across me – caboose in back, tanker and hopper car, box car and flat car, a black locomotive. Sarah was worse and also inundated by all the horrible details of the coroner’s report, the body, the estate, the funeral, the burial. A series of freight trains, but underwater, like some Hollywood dystopia.
I had set up an improvised study in my parents’ house while we waited for our rental to open. I trudged up there most mornings for a few weeks, trying to summon the courage to face words that once felt so vital but in the pall of death seemed lifeless and distant. The question I met when I saw my mother at the door – “How are you doing” – brought me to tears. Not well. How could it be otherwise? The insistent stubborn happiness of American culture and its empty dialogues – “Great! – how about you?” –never felt falser.
But I did find the courage, somehow. I found the current of thought that flowed beneath and through the words on the page. I discovered an inquirer who did not turn away from the worst, who confronted the tragic and celebrated the comic. I found a survivor who came of age among the smoldering ruins of war and did not insulate himself against this but sought its origins, its stories, its mysteries. Asking the questions, visiting the places, seeing for himself how this conflict had stolen an entire generation: in this way Herodotus exemplified a way of being necessary for my own grief and sorrow, my mourning not just of my beloved mother-in-law but also for a lost world, a stolen future of intergenerational family and thriving shared humanity. This world had always been a fantasy, but I still felt its loss immensely. And now without my mother-in-law, my son having lost his grandma and my wife her mother, I found a companion and teacher in Herodotus like none I’d known before. I found myself in Herodotus in the Anthropocene as well, a self that could survive.
