I’m reading this book The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and it’s so sad I’ve already cried three times and I’m only a third into the book. He’s really got his finger on what would actually be sad about the end of the world (hint: dogs, also love). Even in the great The Stand it’s more like everyone’s like “look I figured out how to build a rabbit trap!” and riding motorcycles around and performing ad-hoc appendectomies and talking about their dreams. No one is sitting and staring at the empty city missing their wife so much they wish the lord would take them now from this endless loneliness. ALSO importantly Heller’s book is written now, whereas the Stand was written in the 70s, and now your average post apocalypse novel has this ingrained sorrow about man’s inhumanity to the earth. So much tromping through dead forests that died from global warming years before the final plague, thinking about how there used to be trout and pelicans and elephants and now there’s just you and your old, old dog, and when the dog’s gone there will just be nothing. “They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn’t they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?”
Impassioned faculty meeting, something wrong with my eyes and everything is blurry. Missed a meeting with a student due to impassioned nature of current meeting. Thinking about dogs the whole time, interspersed with wondering how to teach the difference between an opinion and a belief; how to explain what counts as evidence; how to ask a good question. Interspersed with wondering when the grading deadline is, remembering I forgot to email that guy back, remembering the car needs an oil change, wondering where to take my bike for a tune-up. Realizing too late that the reason this awesome brand-new skirt was at Goodwill is clearly because it rides up so crazily if you try to actually walk in it. Meanwhile impassioned faculty meeting rages on. The passions of professors are fascinating and deep and often fairly eccentric. If students knew how a bad class haunted us and kept us up nights. If students knew how their in-class texting or sleeping is now being talked about in tones more usually reserved for revolutionary political gatherings. I find myself saying things like “It’s a new world out there!” and “But this was ONE OF MY BEST STUDENTS!!!” Everyone nods sympathetically. We are all in the same boat. A boat both leaky and yet somehow glorious. We admire one another’s fortitude and innovations in the classroom. We exchange book titles and syllabi. We ask each other “how do you model good debating” and “what’s your approach to Google books” and “do you shame them or do you talk to them privately”. Sometimes there is crying. If the students knew. I have to believe they would not sleep in class, if they knew. That they would do the reading, if they knew how much it really means to us. The fate of the nation resting in our under-appreciated hands, like parents.
Made $90 selling clothes at Buffalo Exchange, a new record, not something that usually happens. Gonna blow it all on hats.
Have you ever read The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard (from the 60s)? There are great post-apocalyptic descriptions of how rising waters from global warming consume the cities and while survivors float by in there little boats, moving on before temperatures are too unbearable, giant iguanas stare them down from rooftops and trees. Iguanas everywhere. Reclaimed by dinosaurs! The reptile brain (no empathy)!
You know where to take your bike. Abraham!
But what about The Terror?? Did you finish it? Was it good? I read the guy’s other novel, The Song of Kali, which was this deeply twisted dark journey which was honestly pretty racist, but somehow I still want to read more by him.