Prologue · Two Scenes

I can still remember the exact blue. I had spent the late afternoon in a gallery off Market Street, and there had been a painting with a blue in it I couldn't stop looking at — the kind of color that follows you out into the street and changes how the light reads. I was riding home from work through San Francisco, still carrying it. (I have noticed that in the fifteen years since that day I do not go to galleries the way I used to. I have wondered why. I think this is part of the why.)

Then I heard the crowd.

It was a particular caliber of noise — not the sound of a quarrel, but the sound a few hundred people make when something is happening, and I confess my first thought was delight: some extravaganza, a band in the square, U2 playing a surprise set off the back of a truck. I slowed and looked up the way you look up at good news. And there was the blue again. It was on his shorts. A man was standing on a ledge, four stories up, in blue shorts, and for one suspended second the only thing my mind could do with the information was match the color to the painting I had just left.

I remember thinking, very clearly, don't be an idiot — he'll go back inside, and I turned to ride off so as not to be a gawker at another man's worst moment. I did not get far. What stopped me was the sound the crowd made — the single involuntary gasp of hundreds of people inhaling at once, a sound a body makes before the mind has agreed to it — and then the other sound, the one I will not describe except to say that brick does not forgive, and that I felt his soul travel home with me and stay the night. I was in shock for a day without quite knowing it.

The next morning I was in a café and people at the next table were talking about the suicide, and only then — hearing them — did the memory finish assembling itself, and I remembered what the crowd had been chanting up at the man on the ledge. It was not we love you. It was not don't, there is so much to live for. What that crowd of the young and the varied and the ordinary had been shouting, in rhythm, with something like festivity, was: jump. Jump. Jump.

They wanted the spectacle. That is the whole of it, and it is the door into this book. We have arrived at a place where a living human being on a ledge is, to a crowd, content — and where the reflex is not reverence but appetite for the show. I want to say it as plainly as it deserves to be said: we have become sick beyond our own comprehension of ourselves. We have chosen spectacle over the reverence for life. Hold that sentence. Everything that follows is its proof at scale.

Now move forward to an evening years later, at a country club I had been invited to, and to a hot tub — the chlorine sharp in the nose, stinging faintly at the eyes, the particular chemical perfume by which we have learned to call a thing clean. A woman there was having what the room clearly regarded as an episode. She was talking about the state of the world — about how the birds may not be here for our great-grandchildren, about soil she believed to be past the point of return, about the suicides among farmers, about whole ecosystems coming apart for the profit of very few. Her nervous system was plainly overwhelmed; she was not easy to listen to; and — this is true and I will not flatter her either — she was not, in that moment, listening to anyone else. She was a person carrying more than a person can carry, her whole being unmet, and it showed in all the ways that make other people step back.

A little later, in the locker room and the sauna, I heard how the room metabolized her. She's always doing this. Every time. Said with the small cruelty that passes for wit among comfortable men. And I asked, into the chlorine and the steam, something close to this: What do you think it is to care so deeply for the wounds of the world, and to be met by no love — neither your own nor anyone's in the room — with which to carry that caring all the way into its cure?

There was a pause in the sauna. A real one. For a moment something almost moved.

And then the men went back to talking about the World Cup.

No real capacity for empathy. No real capacity for compassion. Just the small warm relief of changing the subject.

Set the two scenes side by side and they become one scene. A crowd that chants jump. A room that returns to the football. The same atrophy wearing two faces — the appetite for spectacle and the flight from feeling — and they are the same sickness, because a creature that has lost its reverence for a single life on a ledge will not, cannot, summon reverence for the three billion birds, the dying soil, the emptied rivers, the farmers in the fields of a country it will never visit. The ecological catastrophe this volume is about is downstream of a catastrophe of the heart. We did not lose the birds because we lacked data. We lost them because we had already learned, on Market Street and in the sauna, to look at a vanishing and feel entertained, or feel nothing, and change the subject.

So this volume will do the thing the crowd would not. It will look, and it will count, and it will refuse both the cheer and the shrug.