About three years ago, the poet Jack Underwood became a father for the first time. The responsibility weighed heavily: he recalls “feeling that there should have been more paperwork. We signed a form or two and then they just sort of let us take you away. A human child.” A few months later, he started having panic attacks – his love for his daughter had rendered him “utterly fucked with worry”. He decided to write about it, which helped: “my breathing regulated, my thoughts took shape, giving direction to my feelings; finding my thinking voice was like opening an enormous valve.” The resulting book is a thoughtful essay-memoir on parenthood, in which Underwood recounts how he learned to manage his angst – “to live within the fear” – by embracing uncertainty.
Perhaps the most important lesson we’ve learned over the past year is that our bodies are vulnerable, some more so than others. More than 56 percent of adults in the United States have received at least the first dose of coronavirus vaccines, but in India, a catastrophic second wave of the pandemic has led to a record number of cases. As covid-19 deaths have disproportionately ravaged communities of color, inequality has been underscored by the murder of George Floyd and the mass shooting in Atlanta. It’s for all these reasons that Olivia Laing’s “Everybody: A Book About Freedom” is a quintessential book for the precarious moment we’ve found ourselves in.
Our relationship with the natural world is balanced on a knife-edge, which means our own lives, too, are facing an uncertain future. For the first time in history, we can draw from a compendium of scientific research that not only warns us to take better care of the Earth, but shows us how to do so. Yet still we place obstacles in our path, and the eco-apocalyptic countdown continues. What is it that stops us from taking action? Einstein once suggested that imagination is more important than knowledge, claiming that knowledge is limited while “imagination encircles the world”, and perhaps this is where the answer lies. In order to bridge the emotional chasm between the science and our ability to act, we must take what we know and reshape it into something more palatable. We must tell ourselves a story.