Telescoping is the term I’ve started to use, although I am not quite sure if that’s my own coinage or something I read somewhere. It’s the sensation that at any given moment of the day, I might find myself involuntarily zooming out from small personal concerns to epic world-historical fears and back in again without pause. This fluid movement has been with me my whole adult life and is probably a common enough sensation among writers of a certain type…or maybe just thoughtful, politically informed people with too much time on their hands…or maybe just anybody with several shots of depressive tendency in their personality cocktail.
I became most aware of this perspectival oscillation when its movement slowed suddenly in the early weeks of the pandemic shutdown. Even as the virus proved to be the most dramatic global event of my lifetime, there were immediate, concrete things to do to keep oneself and one’s loved ones healthy and safe. I was forced to quit, at least temporarily, the ranging vistas of my overactive imagination and huddle with kin back at the ranch.
It would be silly to say I wish for another such stark event on which to focus my energy, but these days I find it very hard to know where exactly to f-stop the scope. Below I’ve cross-posted just one example of the kind of news that keeps me oscillating—although maybe the better term at this point is gyrating—because I can’t see anything I can do to address it. On Tuesday, Seth Abramson of the blog Proof reported on what can only be called the ongoing, active, inside job of an insurrection we’re experiencing, now run by empowered radicals at the highest levels. Fittingly, the headline is a question, one with no clear answer.
The subhead says: “McCarthy’s unprecedented move overrode express warnings from federal officials in both the executive and judicial branches. And it’s just the sort of government-media collusion MAGA says it opposes.”
Further on Abramson writes, “It is factual, not partisan, to say that McCarthy not only just orchestrated a major national security breach but did so under circumstances in which he is currently under federal investigation for aiding and abetting an insurrection through illegal conduct (not to mention conduct that violates his Oath of Office)….But America is so broken right now that nothing will be done about it—and in fact maybe nothing can be.”
I happened to read this paralyzing prose on Tuesday afternoon, just before deciding to begin an audiobook called The Deluge, a frightening, much-too-realistic novel about climate change by author Stephen Markley. I’m not nearly as aware of current fiction as I was back in the 90s when I reviewed new books for part of my living, so I only heard of this title through VOLTS, David Roberts’ podcast about converting our world to carbon-free energy.
The novel is over 900 pages—40 listening hours!—and tracks a huge cast of characters from the 2000s through the 2040s, weaving together current political and environmental realities with their all too likely outcomes in the next few decades. I intended to dive into the book for just a few hours this week, during lunch and walks, but instead, I’ve been utterly captured and have spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday engulfed by it—so to speak.
It’s a very compelling novel in audio form, albeit not always perfectly read or acted by its multiple narrators. (A side note: I will say I’m still a bit shocked and saddened to learn that a major publisher such as Simon & Shuster doesn’t ensure its voiceover talent knows how to pronounce every word correctly, or to convey the right tone of voice to fit every scene, but I suppose my standards are too high for these slapdash times. If I were Stephen Markley, though, I’d be a bit annoyed.)
The author displays a keen understanding of how things work in academia, business, government, and people’s private lives, and on every scale, from arguments between lovers, or parents and children, or the half-dozen members of an insurrectionist cell, to the streetscape dynamics of a mass peaceful protest-turned-riot on the D.C. mall.
Speaking of that particular sequence—and let it be known that by mentioning it I’m not spoiling too much of this densely plotted narrative—I was at first fired up to the point of tears by a scene in which a beautiful speech calls together a peaceful occupation of the nation’s capital. Soon thereafter, I was dashed back into pessimism about the limits of mass movements to effect needed change, the intractable corruption of wealth-captured political systems, and the ease with which violence and factional hatred can overtake a fearful public.
Hmm, I’m probably not doing the author any favors here, am I? Let’s just say it’s a very worthwhile book for those who enjoy vivid character studies and a few dozen turns of narrative irony with your disaster planning manual. The Deluge is a trendy zombie apocalypse story minus zombies. I generally push back when readers ascribe motives to novelists beyond the relentless need to invent stories, but I do wonder if Stephen Markley hopes his book will be a wake-up call for those in a position to do something helpful.
On Tuesday evening, part of the way through my listening binge, a friend came over for Mardi Gras sazerac cocktails and some leftover fish-potato-corn soup I’d made over the weekend, its flavors maximally blended after 4 days in the fridge. She spoke to me about her recent hard breakup with a partner of many years. We examined the specifics of her situation but also, at one point, allowed ourselves to indulge in a bit of generic straight-man-bashing as if we were impatient college girls and not middle-aged divorced intellectuals with adolescent children of our own. She happens to be one of several people who’ve shared their familial, marital, or medical crises with me of late. Being an empathetic and not very private person, I’ve always had people trust me with their stories of hardships. It is what made me a good human-interest reporter many years ago. Sometimes, when the internal telescoping sensation has me disoriented, I try to believe that my best purpose in life, at least right now, is the timely supplying of meals, hugs, and commiseration to friends in need.
I’m only halfway through The Deluge so I can’t tell you if the novel ends with any note of large-scale hope. Somehow I doubt it. Whether it’s incipient fascism or the steady creep of climate catastrophes—I happen to be writing this on a February afternoon clocking in at 75 degrees Fahrenheit in Baltimore MD—I don’t think we need a piece of fiction to confirm our worst fears. But being engulfed by the telescopic vision of a good old-fashioned page-turner is one way to find some badly needed internal stillness.
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P.S. As I was composing this piece on Thursday, Facebook reminded me of this post I made exactly 8 years earlier, in 2015. I guess the following counts as evidence that this particular flavor of melancholy—this perspectival oscillation—has always been a part of me.
Well, I must say I tend to keep the telescope pointed toward nearer vistas these days, my family, my dogs (but I repeat myself), my community, my work. The corrupted shenanigans in Washington are things I don’t put much attention on. I voted from afar, but if the country really doesn’t care about crookery at the highest levels any more, so it goes. I do tune in about once a week to see if anybody has actually been held accountable because that would be novel, but it seems that ship has sailed.
Thanks for the article, Sandhya. I enjoyed it!