On Turning 79 in 2025

Top of Trinidad Head June 30, 2025. My climb dedicated to my friend Mike and to the
memory of Jim Harrison

On one of his birthdays, writer Jim Harrison pointed out that he was exactly one day older than he was the day before. That’s one interesting perspective on a birthday’s significance, and here is another: for the next year after my birthday I will give my age as 79, but in fact that birthday marked the end of my 79^th year of life after birth (or as adherents of some belief systems would say, of this life). The moment after the anniversary of my birth, I will be living in my 80^th year.

So it’s not too early to consider this threshold. For all of my childhood and adolescence, I did not know anyone as old as 80. All but one of my great-grandparents were dead when I was born, and the last great-grandfather died when I was 4, and he was 79. (Though he lived nearby, I don’t believe we ever set eyes on one another.)

My three surviving grandparents and those in their generation I always thought of as old, but they were mostly in their 50s and 60s when I was a child.

My grandmother and me 1972 when she was 76 and I was 26.

My grandmother Severini turned 80 the year I turned 30. She’s my only real experience with that age. I happened to be nearby for most of her 80s, and spent a fair amount of time with her. The family stories she told me (or repeated from earlier years) I used much later in my Severini Saga.

That was my last frequent, sustained contact with anyone in their 80s. I saw my Uncle Carl on visits to PA a few times in his 80s, and was in touch with him by email especially in the last year or two of his life in his early 90s. I was in touch by phone and email with my Uncle Bill in his last year—he was 96.

Most of the conversations with all of them involved them talking about the past. It was fascinating first of all to hear what they remembered and what they didn’t. But the information, the feeling of their time, added depth to my life. It was I think an important and a satisfying experience for both of us.

For our past and what we recall, what we’ve learned from our experiences and observations are reflected in our stories, and our stories are increasingly what we have left to give as we grow older.

But the young (a category that now encompasses almost everybody) have to be ready to receive those stories. I marvel with some chagrin how uninterested I was in my parents’ lives, and then it was too late. It seems we must ourselves have a past we recognize as such, before we become interested in the pasts of others.

My grandmother got through some of my cognitive blindness by being a beguiling storyteller. And I was in a sense a captive audience. She did not hesitate to evoke my guilt and shame to ensure that I visited her often. She arranged endless memorial Masses for my mother so my sisters and I would dutifully attend, and of course go by her house afterward.

I am too distant from the younger generations of my family and too diffident to insist on their attention. I’ve taken on the work of telling my stories, of writing what I remember and what I know, to pass on to younger people by making them available, mostly on the Internet, so they can find them whenever they are ready to receive them. That’s as much purpose as I can find that gives me pleasure enough that I actually do it, however incompletely.

Of course at this age it is more comfortable to spend time with the past than to focus on the future. Apart from the mysteriously timed but inevitable denouement, we face at minimum a gradual decline in health and energy, so our days—and nights—can become at best a less than predictable adventure. So the present demands its attention—bad moments definitely, but with effort, good moments, too.

In these times it is good to have old friends to talk with about the new things happening to us. Besides my very-slightly-younger life partner, I have an even more slightly-younger friend I’ve known since high school. Our phone conversations are becoming paradigms of old people cliches in the greater proportion of time we spend each successive year on comparing health notes. At least we’re not competitive about it (“you think that’s bad, the pain in my...etc.”), the basis of comic bits about old people from at least vaudeville times.

And we are aware of the increasingly strange and threatening context around us, a world that no longer seems to be ours. He and I were partners in high school debating something called “medical care for the aged,” around the time that early Medicare began in 1965. Now not only Medicare and Medicaid are needlessly and cruelly endangered, but the generation-older Social Security. This being only the most specific anxieties, as we are forced to watch a painfully built protective context being angrily dismantled, with cruelty, brutality and contempt for the non-rich as official policy maniacally pursued.

It’s hard also not to notice that this society has blithely accepted (by blithely forgetting or denying them) over a million deaths of mostly older Americans from Covid, which continue with thousands a month. You might get the idea that what old people are expected to do is die, as soon as possible.

Assimilating the past adds depth to the present, but telling our stories from our past can also be a link to the future, and to the young. I usually have a book or two that inform my birthday thoughts. This time it is Horizon by Barry Lopez, which is the summary and final of his many books.

I’ve read several of his earlier books in the past year, including the best known: Arctic Dreams. Though I’ve had some of his books around for years, I did not appreciate until recently that he is one of the best, the greatest writers of my times. (When at the age of 80 Bill Moyers decided to retire from TV, he carefully selected his last interview for his Bill Moyers Journal. It was with Barry Lopez.)

At some point I grazed YouTube for any interviews and events Lopez did that might be preserved there. The first I came upon was at the end of his book tour for Horizon in 2019, and he began his talk with an urgent message. “Hell is coming,” he said. “Not hell with a small h, not something we’re going to solve with technology, or certainly not an election. It’s coming, and we have to figure out how to take care of each other...and provide for our children and grandchildren, so that they have the opportunities to exercise imagination that we have had. Then maybe we have a prayer.”

“If you’re looking for something to do in the time of climate change and ocean acidification and methane gas pouring out of the tundra, and [the Sixth Extinction]: Make common cause with young people.”

They can use the experience that their elders can communicate to help them tell the stories and find greater imagination to apply to addressing what’s coming very soon, he said. They need to imagine not what is pushing us into the future, but what is calling them into the future.

Others reaching my age have grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren with whom they have ongoing personal relationships. I do not. My grandmother in her last years had a mantra: “We do the best we can.” Partly because I didn’t know anyone past 80, and partly because—thanks to the hydrogen bomb, the military industrial complex, the poisoning of the planet and its effects on health, as well as my dubious earning ability—I never expected to reach 79. But I have, in relatively good shape it seems.

So even with what seems like fewer good hours in my day, and more time and attention taken by health matters, an old introvert night owl hermit like me can do what wants to be doing. In my case it’s the same old, same old. I make sentences.

I often post a poem on my birthday.  Here is this year's, by Jim Harrison.

 

The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.

 I’ve made this path and nobody else

 leading crookedly up through the pasture

 where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.

 It is here where my mind begins to learn

 my heart’s language on this endless wobbly path,

 veering south and north

 informed by my all-too-vivid dreams

 which are a compass without a needle.

 Today the gods speak in drunk talk

 pulling at a heart too old for this walk,

 a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth

 of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

 Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names of a dozen friends

 who have died in recent years,

 names now incomprehensible as the mountains

 across the river far behind me.

 I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.

 Perhaps when we die our names are taken

 from us by a divine magnet and are free

 to flutter here and there within the bodies

 of birds. I’ll be a simple crow

 who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

--Jim Harrison

Very recently, researching the writers who clustered in Key West in the early 1970s for my latest "History of My Reading" post, I watched on You Tube a film made about them.  Jim Harrison was one of them, but he'd died before the film was made.  Towards the end of the film, writer Tom McGuane, his close friend in Key West and elsewhere, read the first part of this poem to the camera.  Then suddenly his voice overlapped with Jim Harrison reading the rest of the poem, filmed evidently for a PBS segment years earlier.  He was standing in front of Antelope Butte in Montana.  

As I looked and listened, I noticed the orange logo on his t-shirt, which looked familiar.  And then I looked down at myself: the orange logo was on the pocket of the dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt I was wearing as I watched, the exact replica of Jim Harrison's.  So this was another reason this poem seemed appropriate for my 79th birthday.

Harrison was 79 in 2016 when he died from a heart attack--instantly, according to his daughter--with pen in hand, while writing a poem.  Not the worst way for a writer to go.  By then he'd known his heart was weakened, as the poem indicates.  Besides becoming a simple crow, he also had wished to be reincarnated as a tree.  

Turning 60 (in 2006)

 This is the first of my birthday posts, back in 2006, just a few years after I started blogging (since blogs didn't exist before.)  It begins a series of  birthday re-posts in chronological order, up to last year's at age 78.  They were originally posted on different blogs, but I wanted to have them all in one place.  And I wanted to see the chronology.  That aspect may also be of interest to others, so I offer this possibility.

  I also assume people about to become 60 and the ages that follow may wish to check their feelings and expectations by reading mine, and they may want to see how those feelings and expectations held up and changed over the years. 

My favorite Magritte, which as a poster has been on a wall of my various residences since the
1970s.  Like many Magrittes, the time depicted could be just before dawn, or just after dusk.
Therefore, it is both.

As I begin writing this, I am 59. When I finish it, I will be 60.

How do I think about turning 60 years old? Some look at how vital we are at this age in comparison to our parents’ generation, and say we’re still young. Or at least in middle-age. You might make a case that these days our youth lasts until 40, and middle age extends to what used to be the retirement age of 65. But as Michael Ventura points out, we’re not living to 120. Sixty isn’t the middle. We aren’t young, in Act I of our lives. We mostly aren’t in Act II anymore.

This is the start of something different. It is early old age---maybe even “young old age” if that feels better. In the theatre of our lives, it’s the curtain coming up on Act III.

This is going to be happening to a lot of people starting about now. When the battleship Missouri was steaming into Tokyo Bay to accept the surrender of Japan, my parents were marching up the aisle of Holy Cross Church in Youngwood, PA. I was born the following June, making me one of the first of the postwar Baby Boomers, and so one of the first Boomers to turn 60. There will be millions more over the next decade.

Turning 60 is a hard thing to admit, even to ourselves. There is a shame attached to it in today’s world. Younger people and even our contemporaries look at us in a different way, and treat us differently. Of course, this happens anyway, whether we admit it or not, and whether or not we announce our identity in this way. Do we say we are 60? Claim the senior discount? It’s scary, maybe even depressing and demeaning.

Part of the scariness is obviously that getting older inevitably places us closer to death. More people we know or know of, people we grew up knowing or knowing about, are suddenly dead. We shudder when this includes our contemporaries, or even those slightly younger. It is hard to accept that we have fewer days ahead than behind. Maybe it’s even harmful to accept it?

Like anything important, both sides of the contradiction are true in some way, and must be embraced, reconciled. There is pain in coming to terms with Act III. But there is also freedom, and purpose.

Michael Ventura

Emphasis is a way of considering one side, before considering the other. Two texts have been important to me in the past few years in this intermittent but intense effort to figure out how to proceed. The first is an essay published in a fairly obscure journal by Michael Ventura, a columnist, essayist and novelist who was approaching 60 when he wrote it in late 2004. The second is James Hillman’s book, The Force of Character, first published in 1999. It so happens that Hillman and Ventura collaborated on an earlier book (We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and the World is Still a Mess.) So though they differ on some points, it seems to me they agree on most basic ideas. It’s mostly a difference of emphasis.

In his essay, Ventura emphasizes loss. This is natural for one approaching 60, and a necessary initiation. When I stumbled onto this essay (in a magazine I’d never seen before, called Psychotherapy Networker) I was jolted. It took me awhile to accept its premises. But in my own 59th year, I came to embrace it, guided by my own life to the truth of Ventura’s words.

The article is called “Across the Great Divide: Middle Age in the Rear-View Mirror.” It begins when Ventura realizes he must make a major change in his life. He can no longer afford to live as he had been in Los Angeles. He must find a new place to live. At the same time, he’s thinking about turning 60, and arranges to meet an old friend in Las Vegas. He drives there, taking a long and thoughtful route.

The statement that rocked me was simple: “When you’re pushing 60, the rest of your life is about saying goodbye.

“Your greatest work may yet be demanded of you (though odds are against that). You may find more true love, meet new good friends, and there’s always beauty (if you have an eye for it) and fun (if you haven the spirit)---still, no matter what, slowly, you must say goodbye, a little bit every day, to everything.”

Ventura’s examples are painfully familiar: you’re saying goodbye to your own face as it was in your youth; to how you drove a car (he mentions reflexes; I’ve noticed night-vision—my eyes don’t readjust from glare as fast as they did), to life without aches and pains, perhaps to certain strengths, and to access to your memory. “Alzheimer’s? ‘A senior moment’? You get used to it and hope for the best. Ain’t nobody can do a thing about it anyway. Goodbye.”

Yes, I know there’s advice out there on strengthening mental agility, and we can all be heartened by the research showing that brain cells continue to be born as well as die all our lives. But the basic point is sound.

Ventura is also saying goodbye to where he’d lived in the prime of his life. Though he isn’t saying goodbye to his career exactly—he writes a column these days for the Austin Chronicle--there is a sense that in some ways he’s doing that, too. Many of us at 60 are facing such a change. For those of us in a position to “retire” (leave our jobs and collect retirement benefits) it is also a time of taking stock of accomplishments, and saying goodbye to having any more, at least in that job. Financial retrenchment has its own set of goodbyes. In many ways, these all imply saying goodbye to possibilities, and perhaps to dreams unfulfilled.

To accept this element of turning 60, I had to come to terms with my 50s. In some ways, my 50th birthday was the best of my life. I’d been living in Pittsburgh but was preparing to leave for California with my partner, Margaret. After years of cobbling together part-time teaching and writing jobs, she’d landed a good full-time position teaching dramatic writing at Humboldt State University. I was attracted to what I learned about the place—an academic environment, in the redwoods, near the ocean, with a temperate climate year round (the increasingly hot Pittsburgh summers were making me edgy), close to indigenous Native American tribal areas, and not far from real wilderness. Yet not terribly far from San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, three of my favorite cities in North America.

I would be giving up my Pittsburgh life—the infrastructure that worked for me, the city and neighborhood I was fond of, and especially my apartment, the best place I had ever lived. It was a commitment to our relationship, but of course I had to think about my own life and livelihood. My local career in Pittsburgh had stalled, and I felt I could grow into a new one in California, but mostly I felt poised to come into my own on a larger stage. I felt strong and at the top of my writing game, yet with knowledge and experience I hadn’t had when my first book was published in my 30s---especially the hard-won experience of my 40s. My fifties, I felt, would be the fulfillment, the justification of everything in the past. They would also set the pattern for my future, for my culminating accomplishments and at last my proper place in the world, with access to the means to be creative and productive. My fifties would be my redemption. It seemed worth the risk.

For my family birthday, my sisters surprised me with a more personal and elaborate celebration than I expected. They assembled photographs from my childhood. And their gift was unique: an assemblage of objects under a glass dome that represented my life, in the form of a room. There was a desk and bookshelves, a computer, a guitar case on the floor, running shoes and a baseball glove, etc. But the detail was amazing and personal: for example, the tiny books included facsimiles of my book and a few others I treasured.

There was a sense of elegy to this, and of honoring, which was moving. Yet I was looking towards the future. I didn’t see anything ending, really. If I were successful, I could come back anytime.

The move to California was much more wrenching than I had ever imagined. Though I reveled in the soft air, cool until heated by sunlight, I mourned the loss of my apartment and what I had to leave behind. I also quickly discovered that while Margaret had a place in this world because of her job, I had none. The downside of the isolation became apparent. Nobody was much interested in me, as a writer or as anything else.

In some ways I was lucky in early encounters. I worked on writing a video concerning local forest issues, and worked for awhile with a Native American organization. I learned a lot from both, but neither led to anything lasting. And that became one of the characteristics of my 50s: a lot of beginnings that led nowhere.

By some measures, I was enormously productive. I researched, wrote proposals and wrote drafts of chapters on several nonfiction projects, often returning to some aspect of the one I’d been working on when I left Pittsburgh. I wrote fiction. I wrote plays, including a musical for junior high students about smoking, which included the songs: music and lyrics. I wrote and rewrote a screenplay, I wrote and rewrote a young adult novel. I used a new electronic keyboard, a 4-track tape recorder and a computer program to arrange and record songs I’d written.

I sent things out to agents, publishers, theatres, etc. I had conversations and correspondences with several agents and editors on various projects. Nothing came of any of it. The projects closest to my heart got the least response.

I got into grantwriting and picked up freelance jobs writing and editing reports, to generate income. I was already saying goodbye to writing on certain subjects (like popular music) and for some publications (I was no longer in, or in touch with, their younger demographic). But I continued to be published—in one year, my work appeared in five separate sections of the San Francisco Chronicle: the book review, Insight section, the daily and Sunday arts section and the Sunday magazine. Several of these pieces could well have led to books. None of them did. None of them led anywhere.

Thanks to digital technology, I did finally get my one book into paperback—when I did it myself. As that book’s author, I was filmed for three separate television documentaries, any one of which might have led to enough interest that I could get a contract for a new book (or so I thought.) But I never found out. Though I’d been interviewed in films before, and was very successful as a public speaker, none of my footage was used in any of these new projects.

Suddenly my fifties were three-fourths gone. I was applying for full time positions here and in the Bay Area and elsewhere for which I thought I was well-qualified. I got a few interviews, nothing more, and usually a lot less. Still, I kept trying and some cause for hope would turn up. In 2004 I got an assignment from the New York Times to write on a subject I wanted very much to write on, that was central to the book project I’d been vainly trying to put together since before I left Pittsburgh. It was a dream, and worked out very well. Everyone loved the resulting article—my editors and the people I wrote about.

But it led pretty much nowhere, not even to another assignment. I was told that the Times wasn’t taking freelance work for the arts section for awhile, and neither was the San Francisco Chronicle. My financial situation was getting desperate. There were no resources for reasonably frequent travel home, or to the wilderness, or anywhere.

For all this time I had gambled on the next step---the book contract, the book or movie sale, even a play production. Then on the good job that would set things right. Redemption.

But then, as I approached 60, I began to say goodbye to all that. In part it was now simply a matter of looking at time. I sacrificed a great deal to remain true to my dreams, even if that sacrifice wasn’t always intentional. I had already said goodbye to the possibility of having a family. That time had passed me by. Now I was saying goodbye to aspects of my dreams that would never come true, not in the time left to me. I’m not going to have a career as a novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, an author with a flow of books. It could happen that I’ll have again what I’ve tasted before, like the speaking engagements I had as a book author, or the buzz of seeing my play performed even on an obscure stage. But it won’t be a career.

A career is about movement; movement with its oscillations but generally up and outward. It is about an identity and a livelihood created and recreated in the process. Over time. But much of that time is over.

This is sad of course, because it’s a kind of failure. But at this point, like a lot of failures or changes that come with age, it is also a relief. It is also liberating. I no longer have to look at anything I do as leading to anything else. Everything is what it is.

I don’t discount the possibility of more accomplishment, even of some kind of redemption in the eyes of others. But I’m saying goodbye to the need for it. Success and failure, what do they mean at this point? In comparison to other aspects of growing old, or to the vagaries of existence that take more control, not very much. They may cause me pain, but pain is now a regular part of life. There are famous people with great financial resources who wind up with incurable diseases. There are people with great health insurance who die as a result of bad medical practice. Having money increases your odds of having a comfortable and productive life, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

Like a lot of young writers, I used to sweat over the passing time, mapping out the years against the number of books I could write and publish, the necessary steps to the destiny I craved. Now those calculations show there isn’t enough time left. That anxiety is over. Nothing leads to anything else. But that also means that I can devote my full attention to whatever it is I manage to do in the present. That becomes its own reward. Nothing leads to nothing.

I know that few people get hired for good jobs at my age until they are already established in the higher ranks of that occupation. You either get a job as a CEO, a college president, or something much less. Maybe not only a greeter at Wal-Mart, but not a job that somebody considers part of a career. And there are occupations in fields of my interest where nobody over 50 is even seriously considered. So nothing I do is going to necessarily lead to anything like that.

Right now I have three small jobs that don’t add up to either the income or the demands of a full-time job. They require some diligence, creativity and applications of skills, but their challenges are modest, as are their results. Yet they all have their modest pleasures. So here I am. Say goodbye to redemption. Say goodbye to great expectations. Say goodbye to all that. The intense humiliation of my 50s has led to modesty. It has led back to the moment.

Windsurfer at nearby Clam Beach.  BK photo

I think I did some good work in the past decade, including published work I can be proud of. I may remain puzzled and sad about the work that didn’t go anywhere, that was ignored or scorned, and I have to deal with the work that was never completed, that may never have a completed form, let alone a life outside the rooms of their making. But as long as I have memory, I’ll remember the excitement and experience of making them, or the struggle and yearning and the promise of their potential, however bittersweet those memories may be.

But this modesty, cooling in the release from the crucible of humiliation, is not the whole story. The dearth of time ahead, and the ashes and annihilation at the end of it, are only part of what Act III is about.

Ventura writes about more goodbyes: as older family members die, we say goodbye to family history we don’t know and now will never know, and neither will anyone else. We say goodbye to the last people who knew us as young children.

The common denominator of many goodbyes is death. He even says that the changes in our faces as we age marks the approach of death. “Call it whatever you like, but that’s what it is, that’s what we politely call “aging.” As we lose capabilities forever, we are moving towards the final loss of everything, which is death.

Some of these goodbyes aren’t too difficult to deal with gracefully, once they finally come. The anxiety over the years about losing my hair (which given my maternal grandfather, was all but inevitable) was far more intense and difficult than the acceptance of its reality (at least so far.)

But Ventura points out that the bigger losses are harder to deal with, and require a quality he calls fierceness. “It takes fierceness to grow old well. It takes a fierce devotion to the word goodbye—learning how to say it in many ways—fiercely, yes, but also gently; with laughter, with tears, but, no matter how, to say it every time so that there’s no doubt you mean it.”

This is a kind of tonic to the anxiety we’re bred with in this society to keep up, stay young, and fight off any sign or recognition of death, to the point that people never say their goodbyes at all. The denial of death—the rage against the dying of the light-- may be in some sense noble and courageous, but it can also be just plain denial.

I was present for the last months of my mother’s final illness; I was there at the moment of her death. I helped take care of my father during his last weeks. But I learned most about dying from Tess, our cat, two summers ago. There were no layers of social complication, of her dealing with the emotions of others, with nurses etc. There was just her instinctual confrontation with growing weakness and onrushing death. Some of her behavior was not according to the book. She didn’t hide herself away as cats do, she stayed near us, perhaps responding to our involvement. In the end our companionship was strong.

But some of what the cat books describe was there: the helpless insistent purring, the hovering over the water dish without drinking, and the faraway look in her eyes. Without hesitation, she did what she could of what she used to do. She went outside and surveyed her garden, taking rests. She was in the world as fully as she could be, and yet she was looking far beyond it.

Being aware of the relative nearness of death as well as new aches and pains, failing vision and so on, does focus the goodbyes. Goodbyes are present experiences, though. They include being as fully as possible in the world of now. This moment that will never come again.

Yet in early old age, at the beginning of Act III, and perhaps through it all until the final scene, there is living, and contributing from one’s unique perspective, experiences, talents and character. When we were trying to be successes, we had to emphasize one or two differences, and otherwise be (or pretend to be) the same as everyone else. Now we have no choice. All our differences are on display. They are our character.

Character is the shape of soul. Without the inflation of early ages, we are forced to accept ourselves, good and bad, with consequences pleasant and painful. We are no one’s ideal. “I walk through life oddly,” Hillman writes. “No one else walks as I do, and this is my courage, my dignity, my integrity, my morality, and my ruin.”

There are characteristics that come with becoming an elder. We must take responsibility for the past and we feel the responsibility of the future. In the role of grandparents (actual or metaphorical), we set our sights on the future we will not see.

“Before we leave,” Hillman writes, “we need to uphold our side of the compact of mutual support between human being and the being of the planet, giving back what we have taken, securing its lasting beyond our own.”

James Hillman

In living past the age of procreation, when physical growth is long past and physical pain is a closer companion, we feel differently about our relationship to the world. We no longer feel only one purpose in life—our own preservation, and that of our offspring. And we want to know what it’s all been about. “In later years feelings of altruism and kindness to strangers plays a larger role,” Hillman writes. “Values come under more scrutiny, and qualities such as decency and gratitude become more precious than accuracy and efficiency.”

What we say goodbye to as we age reveals some hellos: hello perhaps to some sharper memories from the distant past. Hello to insights as well as embarrassments. Hello to other worlds. "Discovery and promise do not belong solely to youth;" Hillman insists, "age is not excluded from revelation." Indeed, if the theatre is any guide, Act III is when it's more likely to happen.

Hillman was one of the first since Jung to introduce concepts of soul in psychology. (For Jung, “psyche” and “soul” were virtually identical.) I find the relationship of character, aging and soul most comprehensible, at least intuitively, when I think of soul as not something in the body (as we were taught in Catholic school) but the body as being enclosed in soul.

We do things to do them, we live in the moment and work for the future of what we will leave behind. Character and contribution to the future are the final adventures. "A certain kind of reasonableness is its advocate, and a certain kind of morality adds its blessings," writes Carl Jung. "But to have soul is the whole venture of life..."

Part of what this has meant for me is represented by this site and its companion, the Boomer Hall of Fame, as well as my other ongoing projects (Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, Soul of Star Trek, Blue Voice etc.) Here at 60’s Now I hope to explore issues pertinent to my generation, our present, past and the future we won’t see.

That’s something else important about Act III-- the character has lived through Acts I and II. We carry our history and the history we’ve experienced, not only in the weight and reference of our words, but in ourselves. I am all that I am, including the heroes of my youth, and those that gave me the imagery of my middle years, and those that inform me now. So that is also why I hope to build a kind of database of those influences from the past in the Boomer Hall of Fame.

I expect all this to happen slowly, fitfully, cumulatively. These aren’t the text-messaging kind of blogs, lots of short items off the cuff and often. Sometimes they will be. And while they won’t often be as long as this, I will take some care with them. I hope you’ll come back. Don’t be too disappointed if there’s nothing new. Your expectations should be modest, too. But our intentions don’t have to be. My name is Captain Future. I’m here to save the world.

On Turning 69 (2015): Success and Failure

A birthday post from 2015, originally on this blog. This was the first of my annual treks up Trinidad Head on my birthday.

On and around my 69th birthday recently, I had three birthday thoughts.

 The first was on the day, when I hiked up Trinidad Head. Unless you know the Head (in Trinidad Bay, far northern California), the thought may not mean anything, so I've included some photos from a subsequent walk, on a sunnier day. On my birthday there was considerable fog blowing in from the sea. Still, I wish I'd taken my camera that day.

 The thought was simple: my birthday present was that I hiked Trinidad Head--the experience itself (I even got quite close to a young rabbit on the trail) and the fact that at 69, I could still hike up Trinidad Head. That's the best gift.

It's not a climb in any mountain-climbing sense, it doesn't require equipment or training--it's not that kind of accomplishment. It's an ordinary climb--rigorous enough especially at the start, and a workout as the trail winds up. I've been hiking it for about 19 years, though not often enough. And I still can.

 It overlooks the Pacific on one side, and Trinidad Bay on the other. It's quiet and beautiful, and for now, it's available to me.

 That was first thought. The second thought, which came the next day or so, was more complicated. It had to do with success and failure.

 "One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake," Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter. Maybe, but for an American man the basic criteria for success are pretty clear.

You're a success if in your life you make a sufficient living to raise a family, or if you produce work that receives honors and earns you a recognized place among peers as well as some more general community, or preferably both. You can be a success in your life, or a success in your work, or both. You are failure if you accomplish neither.

 I have accomplished neither. The failure is not absolute, I did accomplish something in each area. But not enough really to count me a success by these criteria.

Yet looking back, I have some satisfactions. So the second thought was: if I failed, at least I failed big. That is, the failure (however complete) was not spectacular, but my aspirations were big.

 I was remembering an acquaintance I'd once worked with who I last saw a long time ago in southern California. He showed me a script he'd written for a sitcom then on TV. I never saw him again. Though it appears he had some achievements in the movies and TV, it wasn't as a writer. There are other similar cases I know.

 I made compromises in my working life. But at least I did not try to write scripts for sad sitcoms or pathetic or loathsome movies, and failed. I failed trying to write the most ambitious works, the best works I could dream up, in whatever form. What I failed at was big.


The third thought is perhaps a corollary. If I were to describe, as simply as possible, what I did all my life, I might say, "I made sentences." (Nobody has asked me that question, nor any like it for quite awhile, but at least I have the answer ready.) I also made music, and dreamed up images, wrote dialogue and so on. But basically, in the range of work I did for love, a larger duty and for hire, I made sentences.

 John Banville began his review of books on Emerson this way:"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." Of course in addition to sentences, I made paragraphs and pages and so on. I thought about and worked at all these forms, but they are basically built with sentences. So I'll make my stand with the sentence.

 And if it is indeed humankind's greatest invention, it matters less what those sentences were about than the fact that I worked at making them the best sentences I could. While trying to lead an honorable life. It was not a bad way to use a life. So I think I'll keep doing it.

On Turning 71 in 2017: Reporting Yet

My 71st Year

After surmounting three-score and ten,
With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows,
My parents' deaths, the vagaries of my life, the many tearing
   passions of me, the war of '63 and '4,
As some old broken soldier, after a long, hot, wearying march,
  or haply after battle.
To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call,
   Here, with vital voice,
Reporting yet, saluting yet the Officer over all.

Walt Whitman

(When I posted this in 2017 I received a comment on it from a dear friend, Joyce Morgan, who I knew through three last names beginning in high school.  This is what she wrote: you are still here.  your voice is still heard.  your presence brings much to many.)
 

In recent years it's become my tradition to hike the Trinidad Head on my birthday.  It's not the only time I do it, but it's become a ritual of that day.  It's the first time this year though, and the first time since President Obama declared the Trinidad Head a National Monument, along with other features on the Pacific coast.

Hasn't changed anything--the trail is still rocky and narrow, which is reassuring in a way. This year on 30 June it was cloudy but bright when I started, and I could see the fog coming in as I headed up.

By the time I reached my favorite bench, you couldn't see the ocean anymore.  I went on to the top just to make it official.  My windbreaker and glasses were wet by the time I got back down.

A Spanish ship sailed into Trinidad Bay in June 1775, named the place Trinidad because it was the feast of the Trinity, and sailed away.  The Yurok lived near here, and they were left in peace for another 75 years.  But once the 49ers came, it took only a decade or so before their way of life for thousands of years was destroyed forever.  Their descendants are nearby.

On Turning 72 in 2018: I Dwell in Possibility

Returning to my reposts of birthday essays, which will eventually form an almost continuous series of observations, expectations etc. spanning nearly 20 years.  

It was a pretty good 72nd year.  No one close to me died, or came down with a serious illness or injury, though I certainly know people my age with significant health challenges.  The exception is our beloved cat Pema--we're currently nursing her through a terminal illness, making this a sad and anxious time. But as for my health, I'm looking forward to my annual trek up Trinidad Head later today. Yesterday I set my home court record with 7 straight midrange baskets (I can't in good conscience call them "jumpers") and 9 out of 10, before I missed two in a row.

I'm pleased with writing I did this past year, including what amounts to drafts of two short books which I have cleverly hidden within my blogs on the Internet.  My recollections--first of books, but especially of my senior year of college fifty years ago-- went very well, by my own lights anyway.  The process was fascinating. Reclaiming context through factual research seemed to evoke and free memories, some of which came to me in the act of writing.

Lately I've had episodes of visual memories, which have been rare before now. I'm not good at visualization.  "Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach" etc. has never worked for me as a meditation or relaxation technique, for example, if it depends on seeing it.  But lately, visual memories have come almost unbidden, and once I've had them (usually on the edge of sleep but not always), they more or less remain accessible.

The past, both culturally and personally, remains my focus, my fireplace (which is what "focus" means.)  I'm interested in depth, reiteration, a more thorough exploration, rather than new places and experiences.  Fortunately I don't have to defend that choice.  "Don't Want To, Don't Need To, Can't Make Me, I'm Retired."

At the same time, I am exploring new ideas, though they tend to be more like going farther along a path I darted down for awhile before.  Some of these bear upon that other area of concern, the future.

The future has looked dark many times in my life, probably most times.  But there was always an idea or two that suggested the possibility of light coming into being. That is less so now.

The newest ideas I'm still learning about are actually 20 or 30 years old.  It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the scientific ideas informing the Gaia hypothesis were percolating.  Its basis was formulated even earlier, in the late 1960s when I was in college (but it was so unorthodox that it never would have been mentioned in a science class.)  In studying the atmosphere of the planet Mars, James Lovelock discovered that the physics and chemistry of that planet predicted what it was like.  But the physics and chemistry of Earth does not describe its actual atmosphere.  There is another element determining and regulating Earth's atmosphere, and keep its temperature fairly constant despite changes in the heat coming from the sun.   That element is life.

The Earth is self-organizing and self-regulating through its specific lifeforms. Living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the entire surface and atmosphere, self-maintain.  That makes the Earth a single system, and by some definitions,  a kind of organism.

The implications were vast, and go beyond ecology--the study of the Earth as our home--to the study of the Earth as our body.  The idea of Gaia was an immediate magnet for various New Age enthusiasts but in the late 1980s, William Irwin Thompson and the Lindisfarne Association published a couple of collections of essays derived from conferences the Association had held since the early eighties. (Gaia: A Way of Knowing, and Gaia 2: Emergence).

The authors were serious people, including James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the scientist who helped him develop the hypothesis, as well visionary cybernetic pioneer Gregory Bateson, visionary neurobiologist Franciso Varela, physicist Arthur Zajonc, botanist and popular writer Wes Jackson, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson and W.I Thompson himself, who promoted the idea that Gaia could be the guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, there didn't turn out to be a guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s, nor do I know of any guiding idea since.  At best, some segments of society sort of caught up to ecological ideas of the 1960s and 70s.  Others got sidetracked by computer technology to contemplate bogus ideas like "the singularity" or just got sucked into the social media vacuum.

But lately I have been reading Slanted Truths, a book of the mid-90s, a somewhat shaped collection of essays by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. (He is also the son of Carl Sagan, and has taken on his father's job of popularizing science, though he's much more his mother's son in the science he attempts to popularize.)

Their essays were mostly published separately in periodicals and are often repetitive (which is actually good, since the ideas are still new and the science unfamiliar) so it is an immersive experience.  (These writings are however more coherent than either of the authors speaking: Dorion does not have his father's skills and both are pretty unorganized in the events YouTube has preserved, though Margulis is nevertheless magnetic and occasionally mesmerizing.)

Margulis herself transformed life sciences by concentrating on microorganisms, and showing the crucial role they played in evolution.  She also showed that these are the organisms upon which Gaia's ability to self-regulate depend, more than any other.  Bacteria is the essential lifeform to maintain the life of planet Earth, including its atmosphere.

I am reading this in the context of a year in which it seems that the collapse of civilization within the next century, and perhaps the fall of the American Republic much sooner, seems more and more likely.  On a somewhat longer timeline, the fate of the human species is in question.  If the climate crisis and mass extinction are as bad as they seem they will be, homo sapiens may be facing enough reduction that extinction is possible.  In a previous climate crisis, homo sapiens were down to perhaps 2500 beings in one small location.  Coming back depends on how extensive the changes are, and for how long.  Nuclear weapons complicate this further.

Mass extinctions may wipe out all large mammals and perhaps too many keystone species we don't even know about.  But the ultimate threat to life seems to depend on what happens to the oceans, and whether we end up killing them.

Margulis and Sagan leave me with at least this hope for the future of life: that bacteria are likely to endure and adapt, and since from them in time came all of the species we know, they can just start again.  Raccoons or rats or even ants may be faster to develop but then, does the planet want to go through all this again?  I sometimes wonder whether a species that invented helicopter gunships even deserves to survive.  Maybe evolution will settle next time on a scenario like that in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, in which descendants of humans are more like porpoises, who frolic in pools with fins, incapable of building anything.

For the near future, Gaia offers some possibility of offsetting the worst effects of global heating, in that we don't understand exactly how life regulates the atmosphere.  Perhaps that self-regulation can overcome excessive global heating, although it seems there is unlikely to be enough time to adapt.  But maybe.

Which suggest another source of hope: our ignorance.  We think we know a lot, but all we've learned are a few limited mechanisms and how to do some stuff, mostly through trial and error.  We've just done too much of it, on too large a scale. Because in part there are too many of us.

In fact we know almost nothing about our world and our universe.  Steven Wright used to joke: "I bought a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to add to it."  We don't really even know what water is.  We certainly can't make the stuff.

We've made up all these categories and theories that soon reach their limits, though we insist they are universal, they are "laws."  Science has at least acknowledged that Newtonian physics doesn't apply in all realms. (And that's because we know how to do some stuff using the math of quantum mechanics, but we have no idea why they work.)  It took recent scientists like Lynn Margulis to begin showing that Darwinian evolution in its traditional definition doesn't apply to everything alive, or even to the origin of species.

Margulis and other microbiologists also showed that many of the assumptions made about how life works in general was based only on larger lifeforms: animals and plants.  But many of those "rules" don't apply to microorganisms such as bacteria.  Either these rules operated in a limited field or they are generally mistaken.

We use definitions as tools and then get captured by our definitions.  The most interesting philosophical essay I read this year, by Galen Strawson, suggests that the conundrum of consciousness as a non-physical phenomenon may lie in a restricted definition of "physical."   The universes of the very small and the very large have shot down a lot of our middle-range assumptions and definitions.  With dark matter, dark energy and all the other more or less theoretical aspects of the universe, exactly what "physical" means is (or should be) in doubt.

So maybe there's something we'll learn that we can't now foresee, something that will make enough of a difference to avoid catastrophe.

For those younger than me who will live in the future, hope is a daily commitment to make things better.  Hope isn't what you feel, it's what you do.  For me, looking at a future that extends beyond imagination, I am buoyed by possibilities we can begin to imagine but can't quite imagine, way beyond anything fantasized in Silicon Valley.

So I greet the beginning of my 73rd year with a poem by Emily Dickinson.  She was a favorite of Lynn Margulis (though admittedly not of mine)--I saw a line of this one that was sort of quoted by Dorion Sagan.  The whole poem however is what I want to say:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

On Turning 73 in 2019: The Future of No Future

I had a lot to say about how the the future looks at 73 in that particular year of 2019, in two long posts.  This one is about "the future" as a concept, which usually refers to the far future, and in some sense the ultimate future.  In late November 2024, these thoughts take on new relevance, probably for others as well as me.

As I approach another birthday, I mark also the fleeting paradox of living into one's seventies.  While each year seems to speed by faster than you can blink your eyes and see it, each year nevertheless has a greater, more consequential weight;  it takes us inexorably nearer the physical conditions that forecast the end.   So each year means more, and yet is harder to grasp.

Seventy-three--my upcoming milestone--is not 79, and in particular not what 79 often was in the 1940s.  Yet my response to external events of this time raises a question defined by the last book of H.G. Wells when he was that age at that time, and more contemporary criticisms of it.

Mind at the End of Its Tether is Well's shortest book by far, published the year of his death (August 1946) and of my birth (June 1946.)  In The Outsider, Colin Wilson calls it "the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature, together with T.S. Eliot's 'Hollow Men.'"  Wells' forecasts the inevitable end of human civilization, perhaps of the human species, and perhaps of all life on Earth.

I find this particular Wells essay almost incomprehensible, but parts of it suggest forecasts he had made earlier with more evidence.  But first, I want to focus on a particular response to it.

It is present in science fiction author Rudy Rucker's foreword to the Provenance Edition of Wells' last books.  "When approaching their own deaths, some people fall into what I might call fatalistic synecdoche.  They conflate the whole (the world) with the part (themselves), and announce that the world is about to end."

Another science fiction author--Bruce Sterling--was even harder on Wells in his posts to the 2016 annual State of the World thread on the venerable San Francisco site, the Well.  "In this book, the great speculator is elderly, exhausted, politically disillusioned, fatally ill and also the Atomic Bomb has been detonated," Sterling typed.  "So he's like: Welp!  That's It!  No More Future!  For him, yes, that's true.  Personally, he's toast; no more HG Wells."  (And like us old folks are wont to do, I'm somewhat repeating myself.)

I don't defend that strange little book, but I do think all of this belittles Wells.  I spent the better part of a decade reading him and about him, and a recent return to commentaries on him hasn't changed my mind: Wells has to be one of the most misunderstood writers in modern history--with the precise misunderstandings saying a lot more about that writer or speaker than about Wells.

Nevertheless I take this seriously as a caution.  Because in this past year I myself have given up any faith that human civilization has much of a future, with the future of the species and life on Earth as we know it also in considerable peril.

For the moment at least, I try to separate my perceptions that might well be influenced by, if not age itself, simply having lived so long.  The repetition of the same idiocies gets very tiresome, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to believe that this complex of self-destructive behavior will change, before the collapse of civilization forces such changes.  And even then...

I start to resent my time being taken up by such idiocies, especially since there is rarely anything new about them, except some superficial novelty.  But at least at the moment I can still discriminate between my own reactions, and the evidence before me.

So taken together--a natural withdrawal to potentially more meaningful engagement (or at least less stressful and unpleasant), plus the informed sense that the course of the next couple of centuries and perhaps eons is set--I have ceased for one thing to read or write about what used to be called "current events."

Such political, cultural and social events and trends have consequences, and I keep enough of an eye on them to be warned of personal impact.  I still read the list of daily headlines that the Washington Post emails me, and when I think of it I look at Wikipedia's news of the day (which is usually very different.)  But that's about it. I no longer feel it is useful let alone important to follow and analyze these phenomena, partly because they don't matter much in terms of the likely outcome, and particularly since it is highly doubtful I can influence them (or the response to them) in any way.  Otherwise, I've done my bit.  I'm done.

The baseline of the future is set by the climate crisis, which is now having its first effects.  What has been done to address it is very likely insufficient, and there are any number of reasons for believing that nothing really consequential will be done in time to prevent the conditions that will likely lead to the collapse of human civilization, the end of the current line of "progress," and quite likely the end of life as we know it on Earth.

I note that the public voices who've been warning of these possibilities still dance around this inevitability.  Bill McKibben is saying that civilization has a decade to make the necessary changes. He and others have been saying that for 30 years. The differences are that the necessary changes get more drastic and comprehensive every year, and they will not determine the near future--they may at best save the far future.

  Are "enormous changes at the last minute" (the title of a book of stories by the wonderful Grace Paley) even possible?  Perhaps. But the "last minute" is now, or very soon.  Time grows ever shorter, if indeed there is time.  Meanwhile, the Earth's atmosphere gets hotter and the planet's climate changes, in ways that will essentially never change back.

Climate crisis is the baseline planetary physical condition that attacks the ability of the planet to nourish and sustain human and other life.  It accelerates the destruction of the web of life that has been ongoing for centuries, reflected now in the ongoing mass extinction.  Although books like The Sixth Extinction chronicle how much worse it has already gotten, and how extensive it is likely to be, it's worth noting that it's been going on a long time.  In his 1939 book The Fate of Man, H.G. Wells noted:

"The list of species extinguished in the past hundred years is a long one; the list of species threatened with extinction today is still longer. No new species arise to replace those exterminated. It is a swift, distressful impoverishment of life that is now going on. And this time the biologist notes a swifter and stranger agent of change than any phase of the fossil past can show—man, who will leave nothing undisturbed from the ocean bottom to the stratosphere, and who bids fair to extinguish himself in the process.”

Human civilization expanded across the planet at the expense of the very environment that ultimately sustains human life.  Over recent centuries, the wholesale destruction of forests, across Asia, the Middle East and Europe and still ongoing in the Americas, may itself doom the species doing the destroying.  It has doomed plenty of other species already.

Why can't civilization change to fully address this crisis?  After all, previous challenges were met--from the threat of tyranny in World War II to the self-inflicted apocalypse in the making of nuclear weapons.  One reason is leadership. At this crucial moment, there is none, and I see none on the horizon.

In the past few years I've been trying to wrap my head around the immensity of World War II, which ended just before I was born.  What seems clear is that those 20th century existential crises of the Great Depression and World War II were met only by the extraordinary leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and (in the case of World War II) Winston Churchill, plus the contributions of lesser known but still essential and able men and women.  Still, World War II was enormously destructive, and the stories of its homicidal stupidities as well as its unknown and even accidental heroisms continue to emerge.

The fact that civilization has not yet been devastated by thermonuclear war is due almost entirely to the decisions of probably a handful of leaders.  When two superpowers were heavily armed with thermonuclear missiles and bombers on hair-trigger alert, only the decisions of fortuitously placed leaders as well as anonymous individuals at decision points,  prevented the full use of these weapons, on several occasions we know about.

 Sometimes it was a minor military leader who insisted on waiting for further evidence before launching a strike due to false information. But in better known instances, it was national leaders--in particular, Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and President John F. Kennedy in the United States, who both held off advisers and political pressures to avoid thermonuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.  They later signed the groundbreaking first Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

It could have been otherwise.   In the 1968 presidential campaign, interviewer David Frost asked Senator Robert Kennedy what he thought was his greatest achievement so far.  Kennedy hesitated a moment, and then answered: "I think the role in the Cuban Missile Crisis...The only reason I hesitated at all is because I felt strongly about the election of 1960 and having a role in that change, because I think that affected the course of action and the course of history..."

1960 was the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency.  RFK returned to the point about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He noted there were 14 people involved in making the decisions for how the US would respond.  "...if six of them had been President of the United States, I think that the world might have blown up."  He added that "if Mr. Khrushchev had been a different man at that time, the world also would have blown up..."

Right now, at what is likely the most crucial time in human history, we do not have in place anything like the leadership required. We do not have institutions--nor the people that lead them-- with the necessary degree of integrity or intelligence.  In fact, this country and many other nations have been going in the opposite direction, into territory so dangerous, so corrupt and so absurd as to beggar belief.  I don't think I need to say any more than that.

Even if such leadership were forthcoming, it is necessary but not sufficient to meet the crisis of this time.  It requires a society able and willing to follow.

Addressing the Depression and organizing forces for World War II required all of FDR's creativity, determination, political acumen and judgment.  Those who lived through World War II as adults are mostly dead now, so we have only books and other records to suggest the enormity of that undertaking.  Experts today say that addressing the climate crisis would take at least that scale of effort, and that level of concentration, not only by leadership and government, but by society as a whole.  That concentration and commitment was far from complete, but it was considerable--greater I suspect than generations alive today can imagine.

Yet leadership is ineffective unless followers agree with the goal and are willing to be led, even if it is for their own selfish reasons--particularly the more powerful agents of society.  War disrupts the conduct of business, but it also makes some interests rich, so big business largely fell in line.  World War II scaled up and created entire industries.  But most importantly, war (or Cold War) did not challenge the basis or conduct of corporate capitalism.

Addressing the climate crisis threatens large economic interests.  There's plenty of evidence that systematic climate crisis denial has been funded by fossil fuel corporations and those it has made wealthy. But more importantly, the changes necessary to save the planet fundamentally challenge the premises and conduct of capitalism, which today is virtually the only form of economic power in existence.

a former rainforest

Capitalism has always depended on these two elements: ignoring the future costs of destroying the ability of the natural environment to sustain life, and instituting some form of human slavery, which today is hidden in faraway sweatshops and countryside.

Exploitation in both of these senses continues on a massive scale, and it is that scale that has caused the climate crisis.  Resistance to ending that exploitation has been and remains overpowering.  The result is a divided and seemingly helpless society, its human weaknesses exploited to benefit current capitalist institutions.

Capitalism of this era, increasingly unfettered by legal or moral responsibilities towards society and the planet, has fed riches to the rich and deprived most others, resulting in deep divisions within society.  The political and communication tools of the entrenched rich have created, manipulated and exploited divisions, encouraging suspicions and rivalries.  Depriving people of economic security--and what's called income inequality is extreme right now--also tends to make them fearful and easier to exploit.

  Dividing elements of the exploited non-rich (on the basis of race, ethnicity,  gender, immigrant status, "intellectual elite" etc.) for their political benefit is one of the oldest and most successful strategies of these self-centered interests.  Popular failure to understand global heating, and to demand action to address it, has been one of their most conspicuous successes.  For these and other reasons, I believe that Kim Stanley Robinson is right: that effectively addressing the climate crisis is not possible in a world dominated by irresponsible capitalism.  No one seems to know who actually first pointed out that "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." However, we do know it was Ursula Le Guin who said (at the National Book Awards) “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  Capitalism will end--I just don't think it will end soon enough.

There is another factor, perhaps even more profound. As big as World War II was and as much as was required, the nature of the task was thoroughly familiar: to fight and win a war.  Everybody understands that.  That's why every time a sustained effort is proposed, it's called a war on something.

(It is true however that, contrary to retroactive propaganda, many Americans weren't really sure why the country should go to war, particularly against Germany, other than because of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  That's why the US government commissioned the "Why We Fight" film series.  Further, there was a great deal of grumbling and obstructionism from big business and its political minions. Still, the general goal of winning the war was understood.)

The situation was a little more complicated in the Great Depression, but getting people back to work and the economy healthy again was an easily understood goal.  Plus the catastrophe was evident; it affected almost everyone's life in highly tangible and persistent ways.

The climate crisis is not so easily comprehended or accepted.  That's what makes it a particular challenge.  The basic goal is simple enough to understand: to save the planet.  To keep the climate from changing beyond what life as we know it can tolerate, the world needs to all but eliminate spewing any more C02 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  That alone won't fix it--the destruction of habitat for non-human life must also be addressed--but it would be a start.

But there are conceptual problems.  One is the need to avoid the two common reactions to a fearful crisis: panic, or refusing to face it because it is too big and too scary to contemplate.  That second tendency, the one that is currently being exploited, is called denial.  Those of us who lived through the Cold War have seen both of these tendencies in reactions to the enormity of nuclear weapons.  There was also a kind of conceptual or emotional standoff between these two reactions, leading to numbed acceptance, and functional denial.

There is a secondary cause of denial: the basic changes necessary to confront the crisis seem too painful.  Giving up oil, which seems to mean cars, and giving up beef, for instance, are simply too much to accept on the say-so of some scientists.

Besides being exploited by those who feel they can't make enough money in a world dedicated to addressing the climate crisis and other ecological threats, this perfectly understandable denial is exacerbated by the nature of the climate crisis: until recently, and in large measure still, it is a phenomenon of the future.  Why worry about it if it isn't here?  It may never happen.  Worry about it then.  But because of the physical nature of the climate crisis, action must be taken in the present.  The future will be too late.  (I've written about this aspect before, as have others. I won't repeat it here.)

There is also the unfortunate fact that, in a sense, the climate crisis will never obviously happen.  The weather will just keep getting sporadically worse until it is worse nearly everywhere all the time, deaths and disease and disasters, likely including violence and war, will increase until over time the world has changed considerably.  But with nothing obviously pointing back to a cause called the climate crisis.

It is the difficulty that human societies and individuals have in seeing the present patterns of the oncoming future--and then acting decisively and comprehensively to meet the onrushing challenges.  But it is the ability to do so that humankind now needs, and has needed for a century.

Through a writing life that extended from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1940s, HG Wells focused on precisely this problem.  He saw that modern weaponry and other changes made strong international institutions necessary to prevent ever more powerful nations from destroying each other, and civilization with it.  His detailed warnings became realities that confirmed his analyzes and mirrored his fictions in two world wars.

Wells urged policymakers and citizens to think about the future consequences of human actions and of scientific discoveries.  He wrote about history as seen through such patterns. Above all, he urged everyone to think about the consequences of present actions on the future, and about visions of better futures to guide the present.

But at the end of his life he lost faith in the ability of humanity to change its way of thinking fast enough, including this approach to the future.  He had seen that human societies and human thinking could continue to develop to meet future challenges.  But the race between  anticipation and catastrophe had been lost, he felt.  Civilization had become so large and complex and destructive, and was changing so extensively and rapidly, that it no longer made sense, it was out of control--out of anyone's control. It was bound to destroy itself. The human mind had developed as far as it would ever develop, it would go no farther--it was mind at the end of its tether.

Maybe today the race between anticipation and catastrophe is more like baseball, and we can avoid the third out and score enough runs in the ninth to win.  (But then there's that old bumper sticker: Nature Bats Last.)  It seems more likely the game is football or basketball, and even if we are driving for the winning score, the game is over when the clock runs out and the fourth quarter ends, and we've lost.  

I don't think it's true that because I see the end of everything coming for myself, I see the end of everything for everyone.  But I was a great deal more anxious about all this thirty or twenty years ago when I was younger, and that's when it seemed possible that the world could grow up in time.  Now that it seems so unlikely that dire fate will be avoided, there's little choice but to accept it. (Bearing in mind the Scott Fitzgerald dictum: "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.")  Being old probably makes that easier, especially since I likely won't live to see much of it.

But still, it's painful and--in the full sense--awful to contemplate: that this beautiful world will end, not just for me, but for all time.  This is perhaps a particular feature of my generation's old age, another of our firsts...though ours won't be the last to feel this.

I have however thought about the near future and the lives of those much younger than me--the coming decades and into the next century--and I see a world with positive possibilities, even without contemplating any difference in the ultimate outcome.  But I will save those somewhat happier thoughts for next time.