In "Religion and the Anthropocene" this morning, students shared stories they had written. You might recall that writing an "Anthropocene story" was part of the "Anthropocene humanities" course I taught at Lang and twice for the Renmin summer school, and I knew it would be a revelatory experience for these students too. I had the class break up into threes, so each could present their story to an intimate audience, as well as hear two other stories. Then students were asked to tell the rest of the class about the stories they had heard (not the ones they had themselves written). With as vague a prompt as I had given, the stories ranged widely in theme and voice, amazing and delighting us one by one but even more cumulatively.
Each little clutch of students was its own mutual appreciation society, and hearing the students praise each other's work drew out affinities between their animating concerns.
One group included a story about extraterrestrial entities coming at some point in the future to visit the Earth, a planet whose beauty they had heard about from their parents, only to find it a devastated wasteland. Another story in that group was the imagined diary entry, from a nearer future, of someone who might be the author's future child, noting sadly that the world they'd heard about from their mother was so different from the one they knew. Strange synchronicity in solastalgia, the sense that the world we know and love will not be there in the future! The group's third student (whose story was entirely different, a John Green-inspired vignette on green fashion at a skate & surf shop) brought it home to the present, asserting boldly that anyone in her generation would give almost anything to be able to experience even a day from the world in which our parents grew up.
This remark had me imagining the world in which my parents grew up, with its midcentury modern aesthetics and trim black and white photos, before I realized, with a start, that she was talking about the one I grew up in. (Indeed, I may well be older than her parents.) Woozy time vertigo ensued, and persists. The class's other stories, in their various ways, have a similar sense of a world irrevecably slipping away, indeed already part way gone.
