Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
than it used to be. I’m not that old—I turned forty-five this fall—but I lived in Los Angeles for nearly twenty years, long enough to see its climate shift.
Now this is it. The disasters they warned us about are here. The future has already happened. Last year was that odd year, the wettest on record for the entire state. The spring was glorious—I’ve never seen so many flowers here—but it all dried out and the hills up and down the coast are thick now with kindling. This after several years of drought. The driest year on record came just two years earlier, leaving behind millions of dead trees. All of which adds up to perfect conditions for uncontrollable firestorms. This, according to the climate scientists, is the way it will go. Decreased rainfall in California is tied to loss of Arctic sea ice. The dry years will be drier and the wet years, when they come, will be wetter. Everywhere it’s hotter.
By this morning the winds had done their work. These ones are blowing from east to west so there’s no sign of the smoke from here, but I watched a video on Twitter that someone shot while driving to work in the predawn dark. The four even lanes of the 405 freeway were familiar enough. So was the sign indicating that the Getty Center exit was a half mile away, Sunset Boulevard 2½ miles, Wilshire 3¾. The car was driving south into the wealthiest part of the city’s west side. Through the smoke you could see the flames covering the hillsides to the east in orange and a blinding yellow-white. It looked like Mordor.
Perhaps the most elegant and nightmarish of all of Borges’s stories is “The Library of Babel,” in which he imagines the universe as an infinite, hive-like library of largely incomprehensible books that together contain everything that can possibly be expressed in all possible languages, known and unknown, as well as a great deal of actual babble. I was thinking about the story recently when I came across a post about black holes on Stephen Hawking’s website. This is the bit that got my attention: “One can’t tell from the outside what is inside a black hole, apart from its mass and rotation. This means that a black hole contains a lot of information that is hidden from the outside world. But there’s a limit to the amount of information one can pack into a region of space . . . If there’s too much information in a region of space, it will collapse into a black hole . . . It is like piling more and more books into a library. Eventually, the shelves will give way, and the library will collapse.”
Borges’s narrator was, in his way, more optimistic. “I suspect that the human species . . . is about to be extinguished,” he wrote, “and that the Library will endure.”
Black holes, by the by, are just collapsed stars. They are sites of haunting, the forces that worlds continue to exert after they cease being worlds. The tug of the past so strong and furious that it breaks down time itself. And they shape everything. Most if not all galaxies swirl around black holes. Ours does. At the center is a void, impossibly dense, a nothing that is teeming with being.
When I was nineteen I narrowly escaped from what was, until this fall, the deadliest wildfire in California history. It was outdone this year, in October, by fires that raged through five counties in Northern California, killing forty-four people. It was October then too. Two friends and I had driven from the East Coast to the West until our transmission blew as we crossed into California from Oregon. We spent a few days in a motel in Crescent City waiting on a rebuild. Crescent City was foggy and dull, we were running out of money, and the mechanic was moving slowly, so we hopped a bus to Oakland, where we had a place to stay. A beautiful place: my godmother’s home in the hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
We lazed over coffee that first morning, enjoying the view, puzzled by a strange orange tint to the sunlight. The air smelled of smoke. My godmother called the fire department. They told her not to worry: they would let us know if the fire got too close. Just in case, she tossed me the keys and asked me to pull the car from the garage. By the time I had backed it into the street I could see flames crawling down the hillside. By the time we drove off, less than ten minutes later, smoke blocked the road in both directions. Everything was burning.
The memories feel like a dream: we ditched the car and ran down the slope, flames spreading through the underbrush and licking the trees all around us. We made it to a clear stretch of road and caught a ride sitting on the trunk of someone else’s car. He wanted to drive faster so he kicked us off halfway down. We caught another ride and made it somehow to Telegraph Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Everyone was standing in the street, gawking up at the burning hills, the weird orange ball of the sun staring back down through the smoke. Someone tried to sell me acid. The fire killed twenty-five people that day.
I went back with my godmother when the city at last let residents through the roadblocks to inspect what was left of their homes. Only her chimney was left. The car, reduced to skeletal essentials, was hundreds of feet from the spot where we had abandoned it. The gas tank must have blown. The neighbor’s Jaguar was gone too, in its place a few small puddles of chrome that had dripped off the bumper and grille then pooled and congealed on the ground. We found the living room: the books that had lined the walls from floor to ceiling had been transformed into an undulant white sea of ash. It was quiet up there—there were no birds anymore, and not a leaf to rustle—and it’s possible that I had never seen anything so beautiful. I could make out individual bindings and the deckled edges of pages that had once borne words as clear as these ones. They collapsed as soon as I touched them into a fine, slippery powder.
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* I owe an apology, I realize, to that otherwise marvelous beast, the rhinoceros, which shares none of the president’s malevolence, deceitfulness, and dizzying weakness of character, and does not deserve to be tarred by this analogy. But however noble it may be, the rhinoceros is not a delicate creature, and the Rhino, whatever he may intend, only ever wrecks things.
3.
Driving home the other night I saw a shooting star, huge and green and straight ahead of me, streaking so low across the sky that it seemed to hang there for a moment before it faded. I thought for a second that it must be a stray rocket from the marine base just off the highway in Twentynine Palms, and perhaps it was. Hegel, the German philosopher who wrote a great deal about history and the nature of change over time, also wrote about strange things that fly through the early evening sky, and about owls. It’s one of his catchier lines, and certainly his most famous, from the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.” Minerva being the Roman equivalent to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, weaving, and war, who at times took the form of an owl. What Hegel meant is that wisdom comes too late. Always. (“It is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm.”) At any given moment the froth and swirl of events can only blind us and confuse us. There is no way to get above them from within the confines of the present. Only after the fact, when night is already falling, are we able to look back and understand.
We might now look back, for instance, to 1820, when Hegel first published those words, when coal-powered steam engines were beginning to replace water wheels in the busy textile mills of northern England. (Germany and the United States would not turn to coal until after the transition in Great Britain was complete.) But for that owl and its nocturnal habits, we might, with all the smugness of hindsight, insist that the black smoke that spilled from their chimneys and filled their lungs should have given early industrialists a potent clue that this would not end well. And we might remind ourselves that the owl will fly again tonight, and again at dusk tomorrow, and that none of this has ended yet.
Hegel, in any case, looked back and saw something like God, which he called Spirit. Human history was for him a rational process, and also a divine one. Subjected to the vigilance of philosophy, the logic propelling it would reveal itself, but only after the fact.