If, as I said earlier, we have lost our sense of a solid and, if not stable, at least eternal, ongoing human world within which our stories are lodged, out of which their conflicts arise, into which they resolve—then this loss is not just because we have been told that our way of life will likely become impossible sometime in the next 50 years, due to processes that we cannot directly perceive, which no one fully understands and most people don’t understand at all. It is also (I think primarily) because of perfectly tangible factors in our everyday existence.
The very partial list of problems in the last crumb is meant to give a sense of the sort of factors I mean, of their scope and pervasiveness.
Global climate change, real as it may be, has such a hold on our imaginations in part because we are already, right now, surrounded by physical things and social conditions that make us feel that the world is flimsy, ugly, and bad. It is this immediate experience, more than any environmental or political conditions, that makes it so hard to tell stories about our current world. Because one of the first things stories do, maybe their most fundamental pleasure, is to absorb us into an atmosphere, a texture, a mood, to conjure from scenery, gestures, objects, faces, a world we want to inhabit. But who wants to be absorbed into this atmosphere? What we long for is to get out of it.
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