IT gets knocked all the time for being an undisciplined book. Reviewers use words like “baggy” and “overstuffed” (and sometimes “cocaine addiction”) but for me at least, IT provided a great lesson in how to create a narrative. First, the book’s structure taught me that books had structure, that an author orchestrated a story. They didn’t just pop out fully formed, like narratives were Athena and all writers were Zeus.
Thanks to King’s habit of writing garrulous introductions to his books, he gave his readers the sense that these books had been written by a person, with a life that was unfolding at the same time as his readers’. And since he was my First Adult Author, he wasn’t a Long Dead Edwardian like L.M. Montgomery, or a Long Dead Victorian like Louisa May Alcott, or a Long Dead, uhhh, Pioneer Person(?) like Laura Ingalls Wilder. He was alive now, he sat at a desk in Maine and wrote this book I was holding. He wrote introductions to his books where he explained his inspirations, and later he wore nonfiction books about writing and horror as a genre. This was his job, and he did it with thought and care. Which is why, I think, that I noticed the book’s structure itself, the way the sections bounce between the Losers Club of 1985, their younger selves in 1958, horrible interludes that show us Pennywise’s murders, terrifying side plots with Henry Bowers and Bev’s disgusting husband Tom, all weaving together to the final confrontation with IT. And this created a particular reading experience that has stuck with me ever since.
My stove and I have been at odds for some time now. Beautiful and wasteful, it is the kind that is ubiquitous in Los Angeles kitchens of a certain vintage and which has chrome fins like a muscle car. And like those muscle cars, it is a gas guzzler. Aside from the standard four burners, there is a griddle as big as an atlas, and a multi-tiered “broyl-oven” (also branded, in mid century ad-speak, as a Grillevator). And most of all, a whopping five pilot lights to keep it all going. When I wipe down the stovetop, my sponge sizzles. It emits heat like a radiator through the winter season, and after a first sweltering summer in the apartment, I learned to cut the gas on the hottest days.
But as the news comes in more and more about the warming planet and the runaway waste that is fueling it, I’ve tried to put myself in the mindset of a 1942 manual for cooking during wartime, gorgeously written by M.F.K Fisher in an era of strict rationing. Though Fisher is better known for sumptuous reflections on food like Serve it Forth and Consider the Oyster, it is her book on austerity that has set me on a path towards winning that battle against the oven. So in spite of the awkward shuffling of burner covers and matches it takes to re-light the stove, in between meals I tighten the valve and let those five busy pilot lights go out.
It took me a while to start noticing how pervasive a symbol trees are. I grew up surrounded by them—large, fibrous palm trees and stone pines with fragrant resin on the French Riviera, the stately oak and the blazing maple in the front yard of our Michigan house—and this had made me take them for granted. They were just there, part of the larger, textured fabric of life. Unlike mountains and oceans, they did not feel remote from human experience and therefore unknowable. I could have been a tree. We all could have. It was just a matter of chance DNA rearrangements.
But trees are everywhere as symbols and ciphers, both of ourselves and of the spiritual structures we have designed to make sense of the world. In this Anthropocenic age, looking to them as a source of a deeper understanding of what life actually is is not just rewarding but absolutely vital, and writers have picked up on the urgency of such an enterprise. Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-winning novel The Overstory, for example, which follows the meandering and intersecting paths of tree defenders, attests to the importance of relating to trees not as inert things that characterize certain landscapes, but as dynamic life-systems that actively engender and shape everything around them in ways we may overlook. Powers’ human characters are there mainly to give us some sense of scale—namely, that we are not much and yet are terribly, utterly destructive—and some sense of time.
Buying an air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”
Why hurricanes elevate our mood—lift us out of a malaise we might not even know we’re sunk in—is a rich question for philosophers, novelists, and people who like philosophy and novels. It’s deepened by the fact that our giddiness often comes spiked with guilt, and a revulsion at ourselves for hoping for, and enjoying, something so destructive.
But the thrill of storms may not just be a psychological phenomenon. A branch of science called biometeorology attempts to explain the impact of atmospheric processes on organisms and ecosystems. Biometeorologists study, among other topics, how the seasons affect plant growth, how agriculture depends on climate, and how weather helps spread or curb human diseases. For decades now, a faction have looked at how charged particles in the air, called ions, might alter our psyches as they wing in on the wind.
Arrogantly, I have always believed that I am more myself in water than on land. It’s just the way that water, like any true celebrity, makes one feel known and held, so long as there is air in our lungs.
When I quit my full-time job in July, I decided to resituate myself by swimming in as many outdoor public pools as I could physically take. The city of Toronto hosts a constellation of fifty-eight outdoor pools-fifty-seven currently swimmable-so I didn’t lack for water, and being newly unemployed, for time. This wasn’t about discovering the biggest or best in the city. Rather, I was inclined to find a path in them, so that I could feel as if I were, dear lord, going somewhere. As in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” I assigned myself the task of swimming home, moving through the neighborhoods and communities that, side by side, would bring me back to myself.