Prologue · Two Scenes

This prologue describes a suicide without graphic detail.

I can still remember the exact blue. I had spent the late afternoon in a gallery off Market Street, and there had been a painting with a blue in it I couldn't stop looking at: the kind of color that follows you out into the street and changes how the light reads. I was riding home from work through San Francisco, still carrying it. (I have noticed that in the fifteen years since that day I do not go to galleries the way I used to. I have wondered why. I think this is part of the why.)

Then I heard the crowd.

It was a particular caliber of noise, not the sound of a quarrel, but the sound a few hundred people make when something is happening, and I confess my first thought was delight: some extravaganza, a band in the square, U2 playing a surprise set off the back of a truck. I slowed and looked up the way you look up at good news. And there was the blue again. It was on his shorts. A man was standing on a ledge, four stories up, in blue shorts, and for one suspended second the only thing my mind could do with the information was match the color to the painting I had just left.

I remember thinking, very clearly, don't be an idiot; he'll go back inside, and I turned to ride off so as not to be a gawker at another man's worst moment. I did not get far. What stopped me was the sound the crowd made, the single involuntary gasp of hundreds of people inhaling at once, a sound a body makes before the mind has agreed to it, and then the other sound, the one I will not describe, except to say that I felt his soul travel home with me and stay the night. I was in shock for a day without quite knowing it.

The next morning I was in a café and people at the next table were talking about the suicide, and only then, hearing them, did the memory finish assembling itself, and I remembered what the crowd had been chanting up at the man on the ledge. It was not we love you. It was not don't, there is so much to live for. What that crowd of the young and the varied and the ordinary had been shouting, in rhythm, with something like festivity, was: jump. Jump. Jump.

Some wanted spectacle. That failure of reverence is the door into this book. The scene does not prove a diagnosis of civilization, and the pages that follow cannot serve as its proof. It does reveal the moral question from which the inquiry begins: what happens when another life becomes content?

Now move forward to an evening years later, at a country club I had been invited to, and to a hot tub: the chlorine sharp in the nose, stinging faintly at the eyes, the particular chemical perfume by which we have learned to call a thing clean. A woman there was having what the room clearly regarded as an episode. She was talking about the state of the world: about how the birds may not be here for our great-grandchildren, about soil she believed to be past the point of return, about the suicides among farmers, about whole ecosystems coming apart for the profit of very few. Her nervous system was plainly overwhelmed; she was not easy to listen to; and (this is true and I will not flatter her either) she was not, in that moment, listening to anyone else. She was a person carrying more than a person can carry, her whole being unmet, and it showed in all the ways that make other people step back.

A little later, in the locker room and the sauna, I heard how the room metabolized her. She's always doing this. Every time. Said with the small cruelty that passes for wit among comfortable men. And I asked, into the chlorine and the steam, something close to this: What do you think it is to care so deeply for the wounds of the world, and to be met by no love, neither your own nor anyone's in the room, with which to carry that caring all the way into its cure?

There was a pause in the sauna. A real one. For a moment something almost moved.

And then the men went back to talking about the World Cup.

The pause closed. Changing the subject brought relief.

The two scenes share a moral failure: an appetite for spectacle and a flight from feeling. They cannot establish the causes of ecological collapse. They can show how indifference feels at human scale, and why data alone may not move a person to care. The causal record belongs to the chapters that follow.

This volume will look, count, and distinguish evidence from interpretation.