Apocalypse Is Now a Chronic Condition

Last week, The Washington Post published an article with a headline that blended, as so many headlines will these days, equal amounts of accuracy and alarmism. “‘Everything Is Not Going to Be Okay’: How to Live With Constant Reminders That the Earth Is in Trouble” is a blunt summary of a subtle work of journalism—a timely and lyrical exploration of climate change not just as a physical fact, but also as a psychical one. How does it feel, the writer Dan Zak asks, to live within looming tragedy? What does it mean to run errands and pay mortgages and pick up the kids from school, to hew to the established rhythms of things, as the world gives way to entropy? What is it like to exist in a place where extinction is a matter not of speculative fiction, but of daily journalism? Every age has its own conception of apocalypse. You can tell a lot about ours by the fact that this particular vision—endings that arrive not with a bang, but through a series of preventable whimpers—ran in the Style section.

The story, as it explored the banality of our not-okayness, cited the poet Alice Major’s (the book’s title is a reference to the current geologic age, the one in which, the British literary theorist Frank Kermode delivered a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College. “The Long Perspectives,” as he called the talks, were meditations on how literature, from antiquity to the mid–20th century, had doubled as an attempt to organize time itself. In 1967, Kermode compiled the lectures into a book, .