Henry Freedland writes:

As climate change extremified wildfires raging through the American West and my native California, and as geoscientists realized the world’s oceans were retaining 60 percent more heat each year than previously thought, I flashed to Hesiod’s view of Tartarus:

The fertile earth
Being burned, roared out, the voiceless forest cried
And crackled with the fire; the whole earth boiled
And ocean’s streams, and the unfruitful sea.

As lies intensified and accrued, as doublespeak and toxic truthlessness were daily revealed as an infection spreading through the tangled canopy of government, I thought of Virgil’s view of a damned elm tree holding “swarms / of false dreams, one clinging tight under each leaf.”

The effect was accretive—day after day waking up to violence after violence, to foul injustices perpetrated with impunity, to reports that a world warmed by human action was spinning out from life support. “Little by little,” as Bede writes, “the fires merged together and became one immense conflagration.” Arthur Schopenhauer, patron pessimist philosopher for the downtrodden, declared in 1851, “The world is just a hell, and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand and the devils on the other.” The idea enwrapped me, tailor-made, even while knowing that this muddle of recognition, this taking of it all personally, operated as a kind of solipsistic self-harm. What I wanted to do was harness the sense of living within a battery of worst-case scenarios and work toward something better. [Continue reading…]