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Carregando... Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Timede Ben Ehrenreich
   Books Read in 2022 (1,241) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  willszal | May 27, 2022 |    )1  BobVTReader | Jan 27, 2021 | )1 Tytania | Oct 30, 2020 |
Silent, static, skeletal, the desert has always been a symbol of death. That’s part of its appeal. But it also signifies transcendence: It is the realm of the prophet as well as the outcast....To observe that these notes from arid America, vivid though they are, lack weight is not a criticism, since they are really only the framework for a series of learned, arcane, startlingly original mini-essays — on Mayan cosmology, on colonialism, on black holes, on the racist elisions and misdirections of ethnologists, and on the suppression and distortion of Indigenous knowledge. Ehrenreich’s scholarly reflections serve to locate the origin of America’s present crisis in the atrocities of its founding; but the root causes he identifies are above all epistemological, and far older than America.... “Messianic time” is Walter Benjamin’s term for “time filled with the presence of the now.” Confusingly, Ehrenreich uses the same term to mean almost the opposite: a model in which events are understood to occur “like the beads of a rosary” (Benjamin’s words) with Christ’s birth at one end and his “return hung like a lantern” (Ehrenreich’s) at the other. This vision the author sets against nature’s “timeless and cyclical rule of death and regeneration.” It is linear time, “that empty, overbright hallway with a single door at the end,” that, in the hands of colonialists, capitalists, missionaries and nationalists, has driven us to the cliff-edge of the present: to “active shooter alerts and fracking-induced earthquakes,” to “concentration camps for the immigrant poor,” to the ascent of despots and the collapse of the Antarctic glaciers....Writing itself is invariably a form of plunder, Ehrenreich accepts; and “all narratives are lies.” Certainly he has no illusions that the writer himself can outpace time: “Even if The New York Times loves you and everyone reads your books,” he writes early on, “what is any of it worth? Gossip squeaked between lemmings racing for the cliffs. Why bother to write when there will be no one left to read?” ...while Ehrenreich’s book might not aspire to such endurance, it is more than lemming-gossip. Out of love and despair (where else does art come from?), he has built a potent memorial to our own ongoing end-times. Journalist Ehrenreich, a contributor to the Nation as well as many other publications, offers a thoughtful, often stirring, meditation on nature, myth, philosophy, politics, and time from the vantage of two starkly different desert environments: the “surging beauty” of Joshua Tree National Park and the assaulting seediness of Las Vegas....Journalist Ehrenreich, a contributor to the Nation as well as many other publications, offers a thoughtful, often stirring, meditation on nature, myth, philosophy, politics, and time from the vantage of two starkly different desert environments: the “surging beauty” of Joshua Tree National Park and the assaulting seediness of Las Vegas....Ehrenreich cites abundant literary and philosophical sources, including Borges, Beckett, Hegel, Rousseau, and Walter Benjamin, to create a rich tapestry of ideas that cohere into “an audit, a foreclosure, a notice to appear,” and a declaration of “the all-but-lost art of speaking truth to power.” Well-informed and -rendered, passionate reflections on humanity's prospects. Nation columnist Ehrenreich (The Way to the Spring) critiques notions of progress he sees as having brought civilization to the point of disaster in an erudite philosophical work about the prospect of climate change.... Suggesting that humanity must go beyond “the stories that have been winning out these last two-hundred-and-change-years,” Ehrenreich creates a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm. PrêmiosDistinctionsNotable Lists
Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time-the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. For readers of Robert Macfarlane or Elizabeth Rush, Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present-unflinching, urgent- yet timeless and profound. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)577.5409794Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Ecology Difference between plants and animals Desert HabitatsClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (2.56)
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5
I think my main issue with this book is that it is poorly suited for this format. It reads like a realtime serial, and I think it could excel in this format (such as via a SubStack or blog). The author is constantly referencing current events (which are no longer current nor relevant), as well as notes from hikes, looking out his window, and the latest Wikipedia article that has taken his fancy. There's nothing wrong as this as the content to form a body of work—it is just not good as a book.
What is this book about? The primary inquiry seems to be related to time.
Generally, I dislike when people attempt to place this moment in the arc of history. Inevitably, these arcs elevate or denigrate other peoples and cultures in a sporadic fashion, due to the impossibility of history ever being any more than a splotchy approximation of the past, full of huge gaps and placing the emphasis in unmerited places. This book does some of this. It is something I dislike because it is an ontology that creates external cultural authorities (in this case, authorities that are of other times), which undermines the agency of our own time and own culture (which, of course, has influences from other times, but is also distinct). I also dislike this practice because it reinforces dominant paradigms around time. What if we had an "efficient history" theory, similar to the efficient markets theory—which would say that, all history is already fully integrated into the present, and therefore, any comments about history will necessarily be less accurate than the ways in which it has already implicitly shaped present circumstances?
I am fascinated by non-dominant conceptions of time. Unfortunately, the author only seems to highlight more-or-less three modalities: 1) linear, 2) cyclical, 3) apocalyptic. I'm deeply familiar with all three of these modalities already, and am interested in more intuitive theories of time. For example, even though it wasn't explicit, in reading Andreas Weber's "The Biology of Wonder," I got the sense that time is an artifact of life. In other words, non-living objects (by Weber's definition), such as Weber, can perceive and bring attention to across the entirety of their existence across time. In other words, for a rock, time doesn't plod along from moment to moment, but is rather, holographic. This, in turn, destroys the life-centric view of time. Since rocks don't need to worry about reproduction and mortality, they have no need for the mental construct of a "moment in time." Anyways, why isn't Ehrenreich writing more about this, or interestingly intriguing and enlightening subjects?
To come back to the text again—the current events of the beforetimes (before COVID) seem so innocent. I found it challenging to sympathize with our authors concerns—not because they're unmerited, but because they've been overshadowed by my own "current events." If Ehrenreich thought the Trump presidency was apocalyptic, I'm not sure what superlatives are left to describe our current era. (