sad thoughts on the end of the school year

 

I can’t hold together, in my head, these two things: on the one hand, my knowledge that myself and my cohort have loaded up the future with the unimaginable horror of climate change – the effects of which abound for anyone with the eyes to see – and on the other hand, my boy Adam, whose last day in third grade – CE2 – is today. In my regular life, my organic life, the second hand outweighs the first. Adam is looking forward to getting out and summer vacation. I have this feeling in my chest like my heart swallowed all the fallen leaves of autumn – or, at least one leaf. An ache of nostalgia, knowing that Adam is not passing by these monuments again, that he is growing up.

For the first hand – I have only a cringing fear. I wrote a piece a long long time ago for the Austin Chronicle in which I compared humans to sperm whales. I love whales, but whales do not exist in the hundred millions. I’ll quote myself – a form of auto-affection one shouldn’t do in public, Louis CK  notwithstanding, but I can’t resist: 

“Americans in particular, who are born to a degree of power unimaginable even a mere hundred years ago, might want to consider the consequences of lifestyles which require, for each of us to get through our normal day, as much energy as is used by the sperm whale. The sperm whale weighs about 40 tons. Americans talk about obesity, but in ecological terms, the real problem is this deep obesity, the structural obesity built into our lives, which is condemning those marvelous sensory worlds proper to all manner of swimming, creeping, and flying beasts to irreversible nothingness.” (by the way, my comparison of humans to whales was in advance of the little controversy, in 2010, created when the physicist Geoffrey West was quoted in Time Magazine as saying: Americans now burn through energy at a rate of 11 kilowatts per person. “What you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale.”  But did Time Magazine tip its hat to yours truly? No.)

There’s a philosophical conundrum, called the Molyneux problem: if a man born born blind could, by some operation, be made to see, would this man recognize visually shapes that he had previously experienced tactilely. In larger terms, this is a problem about connections that concerns us all: can we recognize, in our sensual lives, shapes that we know “only” intellectually? We, blindly, have put our fingers around the world. Will there come a day when the scales drop from our eyes and we recognize what we have done?