'Ordinary Time' and William Styron's 'Earthrise' Story
The timescales of global warming This is Not Doomed Yet, The Atlantic s weekly newsletter about global warming. It lives here in the science section; you can also get it in your inbox : Enter your email address powered by TinyLetter So, Paris happened. The last time I wrote, there was no international diplomatic framework for addressing climate change. Now there is. If I havent sent anything to this list in a while, its because I was covering the talks for a larger audience. You may be interested in the two stories that concluded that coverage: Id also recommend you read Michael Liebreichs reflections on COP21 at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. But now its a week or two out, and the euphoria has diminished. The Paris agreement inaugurates a new calendar for addressing climate changewith rounds of talks in 2018, 2023, 2028, and beyondbut for it to come to fruition, that calendar will depend on Democrats winning the White House next year and on climate working very differently as a U.S. political issue. In the medium term, it will also relynot to put too fine a point on iton the weakening of the global far right and on the maintenance of world order. This may all sound a little grandiose, but that kind of comes with the long-timescales and globally-organized-civilization thing. Of course, the other thing that comes with long timescales is time. So in these unseasonably warm days of expectation and rest at the end of the year, as Paris stops being news and becomes a political tool or obstacle, Ive been thinking back to a phrase that also occupied my mind as the talks began. Its my favorite Church idiom: ordinary time . As a proper term, ordinary time denotes the longest season of the liturgical year, which is, in fact, one season split into two parts. The first section of ordinary time spans from the end of Christmastide, in January, to the beginning of Lent, in February or March. Ordinary time resumes after Pentecost in the early summer, and then it lasts again until Advent, in November. Maybe its my limited experience, living only a few places in the eastern half of North America, but to me that phrase, shorn of context ordinary time captures what its like to live under axial tilt, in the Earths temperate latitudes, during the two seasons that start with a solstice. At the nadir of winter or zenith of summer, every week does seem ordinary. The nature of the world does not seem to vary from Wednesday to Wednesday: It stays hot and sunny or it stays cold and dark. But in the spring, the light and the weather one morning can vary wildly from the light and weather the next. The graph of sunrise and sunset times , after all, approximates a sine curve. To take it further from its Church meaning, ordinary time not only communicates something like the time when nothing particularly special is happening, but also emphasizes ordinal-ness: the time when we count up. And its pleasant to count up. Counting up means the newspapers Best Books of the Year feature comes out every December. It means making notches in the wall as kids get taller. It means normal politics still applies, and that not all your time needs to be devoted to the public good: You can still withdraw for a time, care for family and friends, preserve your home. Its not an original observation to say that climate change requires action during ordinary time, that if you wait for the crisis (whatever the crisis is), its too late. I saw a few writers compare COP21a conference to save the worldto a last-ditch diplomatic meeting to stave off nuclear war. But that isnt quite it. If negotiators were preventing war, wed be out of ordinary time, in extraordinary crisis. Insteaddespite El Nino, despite the Chennai rains, despite the Indonesian fires and Ethiopian faminesociety continues, teetering between ordinary time, our semi-performative forever-crisis, and reckless emergency. The awfulness is that, despite the long and worrisome decades involved in discussing climate change, we only know the present. We dont know when we will slip out of ordinary time, and guessing about future historiography only serves contemporary politics. A friend remembered the Four Quartets: Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. And as the talks ended, I thought of a different snippet of verse, the closing monologue from Nixon in China. Chou En-Lai wonders what will come of diplomacy with the Americans: How much of what we did was good? Everything seems to move beyond our remedy. Come, heal this wound. At this hour nothing can be done. Just before dawn the birds begin, the warblers who prefer the dark, the cage-birds answering. To work! Outside this room the chill of grace lies heavy on the morning grass. To workbut please, this week, to rest. If youre looking for something to read before 2016, try Carrie Frye on the balloon explorers of the Arctic ; or Elizabeth Kolbert on the siege of Miami , which is self-recommending. And since this letter hasnt been crypto-spiritual enough, a final note: NASA released a new Earthrise last week, which I found unconvincing. (Among other oddities, the Sahara looks too green.) But Ive been reading lately about the first Earthrise photo, in Michael Pooles tremendous 2008 book , and learned of an episode I hadnt before heard. Forty-seven years ago, Apollo 8 broadcast from their final orbit of the moon. Hours before, they had glimpsed and photographed Earthrise for the first time. You can watch this broadcast on YouTube ; all of this is famous space history. But I was not familiar with William Styrons account of watching the transmission: It was an icy Connecticut evening in a house filled with noisy festivity. My hosta teacher of renown whom I greatly esteemhas a mind of generous curiosity and of eclectic concern, but is a man with a blind spot, at least at that time; he had found the space program a technocratic scam, overblown, financially extravagant, and basically a bore. As close as we always had been we rarely spoke of the astronauts and their flights. I had trouble that evening making him interrupt the party so that we could turn on the television set and follow the progress of the Apollo module as it began its circuit around the moon. Suddenly, there before us was that stark sphere, the craters, the jagged shadows that one knew to be chaotic mounds of rubble, the glistening white landscape projected against a backdrop of unfathomable darkness. The murmur and laughter of the party diminished and died, and we watched in silence while William Anders spoke the words from Genesis: In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth, And the Earth was without form, and void... Ceremonial words tend to sound hollow and inappropriate, generally because they are predictable, touched by the stale hand of prearrangement. But these words, spoken at one of historys truly heroic ceremonials, seemed entirely appropriate, and I remember that a chill coursed down my back and an odd sigh went through the gathering like a tremor or a wind. Then how was it possible to be more deeply affected, to discover a pitch of eloquence more grand than those incantatory lines? Simple. Listen to Frank Borman, whose cheery valedictory brought home the reality, nearly lost in the sheer awesomeness of the occasion, that we were witnessing the exploits not of some crew of demigods or archangels, but of mortally fleshed men like those of us gathered around a winters fire: Goodbye, good night. Merry Christmas. God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth. I glanced at my host, the mistrusting and scornful teacher, and saw on his face an emotion that was depthless and inexpressible.