We Are The Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer
Where to fucking start.
I came across the book when I listened to Safran Foer’s interview on the Penguin Podcast. I’ve come across books on sustainability and climate change before, but this sounded a lot more interesting because it didn’t seem to be about intellectual arguments; it was emotional and personal, and because of that, it seemed honest
It starts off with talking about the oldest suicide note in the world and only gets better from there. The book, at least the first part of the book, is made up of loosely related essays. My favourite is still Not a Good Story. I read it twice and then immediately read it out to Anu. In it, he argues that certain stories are just better than others and tend to spread more easily, just like some genes are “better” than others. He gives several examples of stories that worked really well, those that didn’t work, those that didn’t work but were tweaked to work and so on.
Would Christianity have spread if instead of being crucified on a cross, Jesus had been drowned in bath? Would Anne Frank’s diary be so widely read if she had been a middle-aged man hidden behind a cupboard, rather than a hauntingly beautiful girl behind a bookcase? To what extent was the course of history influenced by Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, Gandhi’s loincloth, Hitler’s moustache, Van Gogh’s ear, Martin Luther King’s cadence, the fact that the Twin Towers were the two most easily drawn buildings on the planet?
He spends much of that essay talking about why climate change is a bad story, for various reasons. This is why, he says, so many serious writers don’t want to write about it.
This whole chapter immediately felt true to me, I nodded after every paragraph. The book continues this way for a while where you can maintain some kind of philosophical objectivity and distance. But you can tell after every chapter that he’s building up to something. After a while, possibly because it is so obviously true, you start seeing the punchlines coming. But you don’t feel cheated or anything. It feels inevitable and persistent, like when you know when you’ve done something wrong as a kid and that you’re going to get yelled at. Or like Korean horror. The way I’ve explained it to people: You know how when you’re being given advice and you know it’s really good advice, but you just don’t want to hear it and the person doesn’t resort to personal attacks even though you want them to so you can deviate from the actual topic of conversation, instead they keep coming at you politely? That’s what this book feels like.
That’s why it’s taken me this long to read this book. It’s not because it’s not good or engaging, it’s just too much.
The book changes gear in the middle and he rattles off some statistics to make some points. But even this is well done: clearly, he’s thought a lot about the way he’s going to frame the numbers.
Nine of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since the first YouTube video, “Me at the zoo”, was posted, in 2005.
Somewhere around this point, he also makes his actual point. His first prescription: No animal products before dinner. On page 63.
“Dispute with the soul” - brilliant. It’s part 4 of the book and is entirely an imagined dialogue between the author and himself. And it reads like fiction at times. I would very much like to see two people dramatise this. It would be great. It’s some 35 pages and a brutal read.
It ends well. In the closing stages, it finally happens. He explains the name of the book. But he does it so subtly that I felt proud for having caught on. Maybe I was just very sleepy by then.
But it all comes down to this, as he says: I’ve read the book, I’ve had the epiphanies, I understand. But am I going to do anything about it?
