The boys look different now. The future, which had been just over the horizon, has come into view. But even then, August and Otto could not know. They couldn’t know that August Klein would be killed in the war that March at the age of twenty-two. Otto was wounded three times—including a serious injury in May 1918—but he survived the war. Ewald was also wounded, but he eventually made it back to Dünebusch, where he lived into old age.

Alice Walker once wrote, “All history is current,” and I think that’s true in so many ways. History presses into us, shaping contemporary experience. History changes as we look back on the past from different presents. And history is electric current, too—charged and flowing. It takes power from some sources and delivers it to others. Sander once said he believed photography could help “hold fast the history of the world,” but there is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.

* * *

I cannot remember precisely how that picture of kids tangled together felt before a global pandemic rendered it so strangely voltaic. And I cannot imagine how it will look to my future selves. All I can see is that picture, changing as time flees away from it.

August Klein was twenty-two years old when he died. He had around a year to live when he posed for that famous photograph. Anything might’ve happened, but one thing did.

I give Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance four and a half stars.

POSTSCRIPT

THE GERMAN TRANSLATION OF THIS BOOK is called Wie hat Ihnen das Anthropoz?n bis jetzt gefallen? I can’t read German, but I find that title wonderful just to look at. I’m told it translates to something like How Have You Enjoyed the Anthropocene So Far?

How, indeed.

* * *

Ever since we were kids, I’ve been asking my brother, Hank, to tell me the meaning of life. It’s a running joke with us—we’ll be talking about our lives and what to do with them, or about our families, or about work, and when there is a slight pause in the conversation, I’ll say, “What is the meaning of life, anyway?”

Hank always tailors his response to the conversation, or to what he thinks I might need to hear. Sometimes, he will tell me that caring for others is the meaning of life. Other times, he’ll say that we are here to bear witness, to pay attention. In a song he wrote years ago called “The Universe Is Weird,” Hank sings that the weirdest thing is that, in us, “the universe created a tool with which to know itself.”

He likes to remind me that I am made out of the materials of the universe, that I contain nothing but those materials. “Really,” he told me once, “you’re just a hunk of Earth trying to sustain a departure from chemical equilibrium.”

* * *

In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery writes:

The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,

Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,

Has no secret, is small, and it fits

Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

It fits its hollow perfectly. Its room, our moment of attention. I whisper those words to myself sometimes, to try to call myself to attention, to notice the perfectly fitted hollows all around.

It occurs to me that this book is filled with quotes—maybe overfilled with them. I am also overfilled with quotes. For me, reading and rereading are an everlasting apprenticeship. I want to learn what Ashbery seemed to know: how to open the room of attention that contains the soul. I want to learn what my brother knows: how to make meaning, and what meaning to make. I want to learn what to do with my tiny expanse of the world’s largest ball of paint.

* * *

It is spring, finally, and I am planting carrot seeds in a long row. They’re so tiny that I can’t help but overplant, ten or twelve seeds for every inch of soil. I feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth.

“Fill the Earth and subdue it,” God tells us in the first chapter of Genesis. But we are also the Earth we are filling and subduing.

* * *

How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It is wondrous! In high school, my best friend, Todd, and I went to the dollar movie theater every Wednesday. We watched whatever movie was playing on the frigid theater’s single screen. Once, a werewolf movie starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer played at the theater for eight straight Wednesdays, so we watched it eight times. The movie, which was terrible, got better and better the more we watched it. By the eighth time, we were alone in the theater, and we howled with Jack Nicholson while we drank Mountain Dew spiked with bourbon.

How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It’s awful! I feel that I am not evolved for this. I have only been here a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining members of many other kinds—from birds like the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō, last seen when I was ten, to trees like the St. Helena olive, the last of which died when I was twenty-six.

“I smell the wound and it smells like me,” Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth.

What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA? I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary.

When I think of how I have enjoyed the Anthropocene so far, I think of Robert Frost, who wrote, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” So it is with poems, and so it is with us. Like ice on a hot stove, we must ride on a melting Earth, all the while knowing who is melting it. A species that has only ever found its way to more must now find its way to less.

Sometimes, I wonder how I can survive in this world where, as Mary Oliver put it, “everything Sooner or later Is part of everything else.” Other times, I remember that I won’t survive, of course. I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. But until then: What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANK YOU TO Hank Green, Sarah Urist Green, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Elyse Marshall, and Stan Muller for encouraging this idea in the first place. Mark Olsen and Meredith Danko also gave critical early feedback. Making The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast with WNYC Studios has been an absolute joy thanks to producer Jenny Lawton, composer Hannis Brown, technical director Joe Plourde, and Nadim Silverman. I’m also indebted to Tony Philips and Ashley Lusk, among many others. Niki Hua provided critical notes on many of these essays and taught me about the tempo of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Julie Strauss-Gabel has been my editor for now almost twenty years; I am so, so grateful to her for shepherding this book, and for always finding the story when I can’t. Thank you to everyone at Dutton and Penguin, including Anna Booth, Melissa Faulner, Rob Farren, Natalie Vielkind, Jen Loja, Christine Ball, Emily Canders, Stephanie Cooper, Dora Mak, John Parsley, Linda Rosenberg, Amanda Walker, Helen Boomer, Leigh Butler, Kim Ryan, and Grace Han. I’m also thankful for the sage counsel of Jodi Reamer and Kassie Evashevski.

My parents, Mike and Sydney Green, enriched this book in many ways, as did my in-laws, Connie and Marshall Urist. I’m also so grateful to Chris and Marina Waters. Sarah Urist Green is the best collaborator in work and in life I could ever imagine.

So much of this book was made possible by the people who listen to The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast. Thank you for the topics you suggested and the poems you emailed. I’m especially grateful to the online community Tuataria, who researched the story of the young farmers that closes this book, and to the Life’s Library Book Club and all those who work to make it amazing.

Lastly, to Henry and Alice: Thank you. You both astound me with joy and wonder. Thank you for helping me with this book and teaching me about everything from velociraptors to whispering.

NOTES

Many of these essays first appeared, in different forms, on the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, a co-production of WNYC Studios and Complexly. Portions of other essays first appeared in the PBS Digital series The Art Assignment, founded and produced by Sarah Urist Green, or on the YouTube channel vlogbrothers. The notes below are not intended to be exhaustive (or exhausting), but instead as an introduction for those interested in further reading and other experiences that informed the essays.

This is a work of nonfiction, but I’m sure that I have misremembered much. I have also in moments changed details or characterizations in order to preserve people’s anonymity.

These notes and sources were compiled with the help of Niki Hua and Rosianna Halse Rojas, without whom this book would have been impossible. Any mistakes are mine alone.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone”