The outbreak of the pandemic, so the denizens of literary Twitter never tired of reminding us, was a terrible time to have a book coming out. In part the problem was a dearth of attention. People who should have been reading more than ever were too busy refreshing tallies of the death count, staring helplessly at the ceiling, and cutting into the wine ration. Then there was the unspoken imperative to “read the room.” The specter of mass death had rendered most subjects and stories trivial. To promote one’s new book under these circumstances was selfish and tasteless. Reading itself, and certainly writing, might have to be put on hiatus. (TV was fine.)
A fortunate handful of writers, however, were publishing books for which the novel coronavirus was practically a marketing tie-in. Think Lawrence Wright’s pandemic novel The End of October; Jenny Offill’s Weather, about a woman afflicted with apocalyptic paranoia; Bradley Garrett’s Bunker: Building for the End Times. To this pile we may add the poet Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory, a collection of essays—many explicitly about disaster, some abstractly so—that perfectly embodies a certain attitude toward existential danger. It is required reading for anyone who feels threatened by the future.
The Unreality of Memory is divided into three parts. The essays in part one are focused most directly on catastrophe: the sinking of the Titanic, 9/11, and the Challenger explosion in “Magnificent Desolation”; nuclear tests, strikes, and accidents in “Doomsday Pattern”; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis in “Threats”; disease in “The Great Mortality.” Part two treats of abstractions: memory, self-consciousness, the etiology of physical and emotional pain. Part three is, broadly speaking, about consuming and reacting to media in what feels like a time of unprecedented crisis. It is about journalistic ethics; the exercise of empathy; the avoidance of “compassion fatigue.”
In an epilogue called “The Unreality of Time,” Gabbert recalls her mother’s trying to explain to a relative what it is her daughter Elisa writes about: “Isn’t it more about how we think about disasters?” The reader is warned that, as usual, this “we” is narrowly defined. A short list of those who “think about disasters” would include epidemiologists, astronomers, geologists, economists, climatologists, counterterrorism experts, civil and structural engineers, first responders, aid organizations, ham-radio operators, and even doomsday preppers. A better way to put it is that Gabbert’s book is about how people who only think about disasters think about them.
Gabbert’s fascination with disasters stems in part, she writes, from “addiction to disbelief—to the catharsis of reality denying my expectations, or confirming my worst fears, in spectacular fashion.” It is no great surprise, then, that she calls 9/11 the “singular disaster of my lifetime.” The Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which she also mentions, killed over 75 times as many people, but it cannot be said to have denied the expectations of anyone in its path. People who live near the ocean, or on a tectonic fault line, or in an area where a carelessly dropped cigarette might ignite a hugely destructive wildfire, have different expectations.
This is by no means lost on Gabbert. She is particularly impressed by the high tolerance for risk of NASA engineers and astronauts, or of people who live in the flood zone of the crumbling Mosul Dam in Iraq. She thinks of her own home, Denver, in terms of how well insulated it is from flooding, storms “related to climate change” (blizzards come with the territory), and earthquakes. But her obsession with danger can be off-putting in ways that are never fully acknowledged or explored. As with the protagonist of Jenny Offill’s Weather, it seems to arise, paradoxically, from a lack of regular exposure to danger.
“It is tempting to believe,” Gabbert writes, “that progress occurs on a linear curve, that eventually all problems will be solved, and all accidents will be completely preventable.” Whether or not it is tempting to believe this is an open question. No attentive student of history could believe it, and Gabbert certainly doesn’t: “There’s no reason to assume that the curve of progress is linear, that the climb is ever increasing.” Physics itself is a ceiling on our ascent toward total safety. That this fact has the flavor of grim truth-telling says a lot about our (“our,” that is) relationship to the precariousness and contingency of being human.
Gabbert’s disaster essays are brimming with facts and insights that recalibrate that relationship. We learn that the Titanic sank not because it struck an iceberg but because of the highly improbable way it did. We learn that the eruption of a supervolcano such as the Yellowstone caldera would be a million times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy—and that nothing whatsoever can be done to mitigate its power. These essays are deeply frightening, if the reader lets them be. More than that, though, they reveal that the unthinkable is often the inevitable, and that accepting one’s place in a vast, infinitely complex, and indifferently violent system may be psychologically healthier than it sounds.
“Worry, like attention, is a limited resource,” Gabbert writes. “That means most of us are worrying about immediate threats—like losing our jobs or our health care—rather than nebulous threats that may or may not manifest over thousands of years, even if those latter threats are ultimately the greater concerns.” But the immediate threat, as the pandemic is teaching us, is always the greatest concern. Fail to meet it expeditiously, and you might not have the resources for the future ones; you might not even be around for them. The valorization of anxiety, framed as “awareness” or “outrage,” has led to a great deal of misspent energy.
In her essay “I’m So Tired,” Gabbert thinks about that discharge of energy. She considers the limits of empathy, the exhaustion of compassion. She concludes that it is “comforting to think that when we’re too fatigued to fight, someone else will take the lead. It is, perhaps, too comforting.” But the flip side of “compassion fatigue” is a phenomenon we might call “empathy inflation”: the exaggeration of one’s moral sentiments, and the conflation of thinking about a threat with doing something to combat it. A neurotic fixation on doom has become yet another personality substitute, a way of advertising admirable qualities—not only compassion and selflessness but also sophistication, intellectual curiosity, and a New Yorkerish instinct for the “whoa”-inducing detail.
The only irritant in this mostly engrossing, thought-provoking, and wonderfully written (Gabbert is a poet) book is Gabbert’s tendency to oversell her obsession. She is obsessed with the Titanic, she says, and with the Challenger disaster, with Chernobyl, with, of all things, E. M. Cioran’s obsession with insomnia. We follow her from tweets to links and down YouTube rabbit holes; many of her tangents, examples, and illustrations evoke the feeling of clicking through the “See also” sections of successive Wikipedia pages. These essays rarely feel obsessed in the painstaking way that scholarship does. They feel like products of online culture: chatty, proceeding by exploration and serendipity, self-dramatizing, and full of not entirely convincing urgency. This approach suits many subjects; when the subject is mass-casualty catastrophe, however, it becomes jarring.
And yet. That clash of tones, that abrupt shift from the existential and awe-inspiring to the trivial and mundane, is very much of our moment. While tens of thousands of people died, we sat inside and distracted ourselves with Tiger King. We are designed by the same natural forces that terrify us to carry on in the face of scarcely comprehensible danger. Sometimes, as Gabbert’s book makes clear, the best we can do is not to cower but to marvel at it.