The bleak humour, if not the slapstick, persists through the book as Auster explores the darker material of Baumgartner’s decade-long relationship with loss and grief. Sy has an ultimately ridiculous relationship, complete with awkwardly botched marriage proposal, with a woman he imagines might be a replacement for Anna; he delves into Anna’s journals; he publishes and promotes her previously unpublished poetry and recalls incidents from his own childhood, life and family history, which, in a very Auster-ish way, imperfectly coincide with incidents in Auster’s own childhood, life and family history. But mostly Sy returns to that day on Cape Cod when Anna “encountered the fierce, monster wave that broke her back and killed her, and since that afternoon, since that afternoon – ”.
Baron sees his book as being about the path to futurism in journalism, about his and the paper’s rise to the great Bezosian game. But what becomes clear is that Bezos never brought the Post onto that court. For him, it was something else. He held a tender, sentimental space for it; he kept its deepest threats at bay. He spoke of it as a redemptive clearing in his life. “My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90,” Bezos says. This man who long ago delivered his whole soul to the gods of commerce seemed to recognize the Post as something outside his realm, and worked to keep it going at surprising cost. He allowed it to be everything except business. That’s why the paper was so good.
Recently, a group of scientists set about searching for evidence that we’ve entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. They dug up mud from the world’s deepest lakes and cut cores from remote glaciers, looking for tiny anthropogenic markers: soot from combustion processes, microplastic particles and artificial radionuclides – the deadly fallout from thousands of nuclear-weapons tests. Trapped between layers of sediment and ice, all this human-made dust represents a point in time when we began to significantly alter the planet in ways that will still be visible far into the future. Whether or not you agree that we’ve entered a new geological time period (perhaps you consider our impact on Earth a mere blip in its 4.5-billion-year history), there’s no denying that dust is a marker of our modern world, as Jay Owens reveals in her new book.