I felt an unfamiliar gladness, soft and pressing, bubbling up. I’ve thought about it many times in the months that have passed since then: the strange, buzzing joy I felt standing in that parking lot saying goodbye and then driving home alone. Even at the time it felt crazy, like I really was high, though I was entirely sober. It was as if I knew—though I couldn’t have known—that I was stepping onto the path that these pages record, as if the joy of discovery preceded the exploration and I were grateful for a journey that I had not yet undertaken, that I didn’t even know I was on. I wouldn’t start writing until at least a week later, and when I did I had no idea it would become this book. I didn’t intend to write a book at all, much less to wage a battle against time, or at least against a certain conception of it, the one that still rules most of our lives and determines how we live them, how we conceive of what has passed before us and of the futures it might still be possible to build.
But that is what I did. That is where those owls would lead me. To fight against that notion of time, I would have to understand how it came to be shaped the way it is, and why we experience it as we do. I would have to ask what histories had to be erased and what new narratives invented for time to rule our lives this way. To figure out, if I could, how those omissions and accretions led us to precisely this perilous moment, in which everything, time included, appears to be on the verge of collapse.
When I did start writing, all I wanted was to remember the owls. I wanted to pin them down like any other memory, so that they wouldn’t fade too quickly. One day, if it occurred to me, I wanted to be able to read back and remember what it had felt like: the uncanny beauty of their flight, those late-autumn flowers, the violet light of dusk. But they didn’t let me. They wouldn’t stop flying. They disappeared behind the rocks and kept reappearing again and again. Weeks after I had left them, they led me to the Maya realm of the dead—you’ll see it soon enough—and from there to Hegel and Athena, and to the people who lived where I lived before I arrived there. I won’t tell you the rest but I kept following them because I was trying to understand not just time but writing too, and I realized that time and writing are inseparable. Writing extends us in time. It tries to. So that things won’t fade too quickly. And by writing I mean something more basic than what gets called literature: the act of inscribing, typing, scribbling, carving, or painting pictographs or glyphs or letters just like these, lines and arcs and loops that stand in for sounds and combine to form words capable of preserving thoughts, ideas, memories, impressions, histories, myths, all the immaterial substance of a culture, its battles over its own past and its present, and its battles over time, and over what it will fight to become.
In any case, I couldn’t have known, but there it is: somehow I knew, and I felt happy. Some part of me understood, and didn’t know how to tell the rest of me. Sometimes time moves like that, not straight but sideways, backward even, and, like the owls, in silence, in broad and looping arcs.
2.
Yesterday I came upon an article about something called “marine ice cliff instability.” The idea being that as ocean temperatures rise and icebergs break away from the glaciers that cover West Antarctica, they reveal higher and higher cliffs of ice. If the cliffs reach a certain height, the ice will no longer be able to support its own weight and will begin to crumble off in giant shards. Enormous, skyscraper-sized icicles will splash into the sea, each one rendering the cliff behind it taller and more unstable and prone to collapse. In other words, it could all go very suddenly.
“The destruction would be unstoppable,” the article pronounced. This could happen before the century ends. In the next twenty years even. It could mean that in our children’s lifetimes, if not our own, the oceans would very swiftly rise eleven feet or more, nearly four times as much as previously projected. Mumbai would be inundated. So would Hong Kong, Shanghai, New Orleans, Jakarta, Lagos, south Florida, and Bangladesh. New York and London would not fare well. Not millions but hundreds of millions of people would be displaced.
I read an article like this almost every week. I don’t look for them. They show up on my Twitter feed in the morning over coffee, with the day’s eructations from the Rhino and funny alpaca GIFs and the latest in police killings. From last week, November 15: climate scientists forecast that temperatures are likely to rise 3.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, more than twice the 1.5-degree target agreed to in Paris by every country in the world except the United States. From November 2: a new report—I have come to fear the words “a new report”—predicts climate change will push tens of millions of people from their homes in just the next decade, “creating the biggest refugee crisis the world has ever seen.” On October 30 there was another new report: global emissions of carbon dioxide, which had appeared to be tapering off, leaped in 2016 by more than 50 percent over the previous year, reaching a level not observed since the mid-Pliocene era, approximately three million years ago. Whatever happens, there is no reason to doubt that human civilization, and all life on the planet, will be radically reshaped. On October 13: French scientists announce that thousands of penguins have starved to death in Antarctica. In a colony of forty thousand Adélie penguins, only two chicks survived.
I finished my coffee. I took a shower, got dressed, and thought about those owls.
I remember, when I was a kid, staring at road maps, the kind you bought at gas stations and carried in the glove box, and that were, for me at least, impossible to properly refold. I remember looking at all those intersecting lines representing roads laid over and carved through the earth, dirt tracks and superhighways, the insolent grids of the cities. I wanted to follow them all to the end. I remember thinking that if you could get hold of all the maps for the entire country, or even the hemisphere, and spread them out side by side, it would be obvious that every road leads to every other road, that everything is connected. The dull suburban lane on which I lived would carry me eventually to rocky paths in Patagonia and the rutted logging roads that cross Alaska. There were dead ends, of course, lots of them, but assuming you were free to backtrack, it was impossible, really, to get lost. You could follow any road in any direction and eventually, by however circuitous a path, get where you needed to go. Oceans notwithstanding.
I don’t remember talking to anyone about this. As a child you learn to guard your thoughts, to hold close to ideas that seemed simple and self-evident and that you knew adults would scoff at. What counted as education seemed to mainly involve learning to walk in single file and otherwise keep quiet. School meant grown-ups telling you that things had to be done in a certain way, and in no other, that however many obvious and inviting paths might lead from one point to another, only one of them was right. The rest might as well not exist at all. To do well, to earn praise, you had to learn not to see them anymore.
I’ve had some time to think it over and I’m convinced I was correct. For decades we have been told that political maturity meant accepting that there were no alternatives to the world in which we lived, that no deviation was possible from the path that we were on. That economic growth was limitless and democracy would advance alongside it, and prosperity, equality, freedom, and endless high-tech toys. That to question this, to strive to imagine any radically different way of going about things, was a childish and even dangerous endeavor. That our society had evolved over the millennia via the straightest route available—the only one, at that—from a pitiable primitive infancy to the heights of rational civilized society, and that our only option was to continue to climb the same path. That was the story, and somewhere along the line most of us began to believe it. It helped us to forget that there were always other roads, other ways to see things, other stories, other routes. We didn’t see, most of us, that the path we were on would lead us here, into this cul-de-sac. Now the asphalt is melting, and falling away beneath our feet.
We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways