Robert Walser

An essay on this Swiss writer by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

You can read a lot by Robert Walser, but nothing about him.  What then is known by the few among us who understand how to take these venal barbs the right way?  Not that the hack writer yearning for glory would "elevate" himself to such matters, but that he would employ their contemptible, improbable readiness to gain in vivacity and pureness.  Only few know what we are to make of this "minor form," as Alfred Polgar called it, and how much hope from the brash pillars of so-called "great books" fluttered in their own humble chalices.  And others haven't the slightest notion as to why they should be grateful to a Polgar, a Nessel or a Walser for their tender or spinous blossoms in the desolate pages of their unflowered fields.  To Walser, as it were, they would come last.  The first stimulation of their carefully gathered knowledge – the only feature of their writing – advises them to consider harmless the "polished" and "patrician" form of those things whose content they deem nugatory.  And it is precisely in the work of Robert Walser that an entirely unusual, often hard-to-describe neglect surfaces.  That this nullity carries weight and this absentmindedness longevity would be the last qualities you would guess belonged to Walser's works.                

Not to say that they're easy.  We are accustomed to seeing the puzzle of an author's style emerge through more or less honed and intentional artistic works; yet now we are confronted with linguistic imbrutement that, while obvious, is utterly unintentional and nevertheless attractive and captivating.   Confronted with an ease of hand that displays all emotions from bitterness to grace.  Seemingly, we believed, unintentional.  Often has it been debated as to whether this is true.  But this is a moot point, and one notices it when one considers Walser's confession that he never edited or amended a single line.  One need not believe him, of course, but it would be better to do so.  Yet one may take solace in the following insight: to write and never to edit or amend is the perfect intersection of both extreme unintentionality and greatest intent. 

So far, so good.  Yet this can in no way prevent this neglect from getting to the bottom of things.  We have already said that it contains all forms.  Now we add: with the exception of one.   Namely that one most common form which depends on the contents and on nothing more.  For Walser, the How of his work is so secondary that everything he has to say goes completely against the meaning of his text.  One could say that in his writing he, well, kicks the bucket.  That point should be explained.  And here is where one stumbles upon the very Swiss element of this writer – his shame.  The following story comes from Arnold Böcklin, his son Carlo and Gottfried Keller: they were sitting one day, as was often the case, in an inn.  Their regular table had already long since become famous thanks to the laconic and reticent manners of its clientele.  This time as well the drinking partners sat together in silence.  Then, after a long time had passed, the young Böcklin remarked: "It's hot."  And a quarter of an hour later the elder Böcklin quipped: "And calm."  For his part Keller waited a while; then he stood up with the words: "I do not wish to drink during idle chatter."  This rustic, countrified shame in talking, met with an eccentric witticism, is Walser's thing.  Hardly had he taken up his pen when he was overcome by a desperado mood.  Everything seemed forlorn to him, and a torrent of words gushed forth in which every sentence's sole task was the make you forget the preceding sentences.  When he in a virtuoso piece transforms the monologue "he has to walk down this empty street" into prose, he begins with the classic words "down this empty street."  But here his William Tell is already beset by fear, and he seems weak, small, lost, and so he continues: "Down this empty street, I think, he has to walk."     

Certainly some similarities could be detected.  This prudish, artistic awkwardness in all language matters is the inheritance of fools.  If Polonius, the embodiment of garrulousness, is a juggler, Walser adorns himself like Bacchus with wreaths of language that will overthrow him.  Indeed, a wreath is the picture of his sentences. The thought, however, that stumbles upon this is a dawdler, thug and genius, like the heroes in Walser's prose.  As it were, he can only depict heroes and can never shake himself free of his main characters.  He even drops the matter in his three early novels so that he henceforth can live alone in brotherhood with hundreds of his favorite layabouts.

There are already some great examples in Germanic literature of the pococurante, good-for-nothing dawdler hero.  A master of such characters, Knut Hamsun, has just been celebrated.  Eichendorff with his good-for-nothing and Hebel, who created the Zundel brothers, are others.  How do Walser's characters function in this society?  And where are they from?  Where the good-for-nothing is from, we already know.  From the woods and valleys of Romantic Germany.  The Zundel brothers are derived from the rebellious, enlightened bourgeoisie of the Rhein cities at the turn of the century.  Hamsun's characters come from the primeval world of the fjords – people whose homesickness drives them to wander about aimlessly.  And Walser's?  Perhaps from the Glarus mountains?  Appenzell's meadows, where he's from?  Not from there, either.  They come from the night, blackest night, a Venetian night, if you will, lit by the comfortless lanterns of hope, with a solid sheen in their eyes, yet disturbed and sad enough to cry.  And what they cry is prose.  Sobbing is the melody of Walser's garrulousness.  It reveals to us where his loves come from – from madness, as it were, and from nowhere else.  There are characters who have their madness behind them and remain entrapped in a disruptive, so completely inhuman and unflinching superficiality.  If one wanted to name the happy and eerie facets to these characters in one word, one would use the word "healed."  Of course, we never learn anything of the healing process unless we take his "Snow White" – one of the most profound works of modern writing – which alone would suffice to make us understand why this apparently most misinterpreted of all writers was a favorite of the merciless Franz Kafka.

These stories are extraordinarily tender – that much is clear enough to everyone.  Yet not everyone sees that therein lies not the nervous tension of the decadent, but the pure and brisk mood of the convalescing life.  "I am horrified at the thought of having success in this world," said Walser in a paraphrase of Franz Moor's dialogue.  All his heroes share this fear.  But why?  In no way owing to repulsion and antipathy, a resentment in mores or pathos, but for completely epicurean reasons.  They wish to enjoy themselves.  And for that they have an utterly unusual fate, as well as an utterly unusual nobility and right.  No one, you see, enjoys life as much as the convalescent.  He is quite distant from the orgiastic; the flow of his renewed blood sounds like the purling of streams and his breath from his lips comes from the treetops. This child-like nobility is shared by Walser's people and fairy tale characters, who also appear out of the night and madness, the madness of myth.  One usually is of the opinion that this awakening achieved perfection in the positive religions.  If that were the case then it took place in no very simple or unambiguous form.  This should be handled in the course of the great profane debate with myth that fairy tales provide.  Of course, these characters do not possess any simple similarity to Walser's creations.  They fight to free themselves from suffering.  And Walser enters where the fairy tales stop.  "And if we're not dead, then we will still be living today."  Walser shows how they live.  His things are, and here I will end as he begins: stories, essays, poetry, shorter prose, and suchlike.      

Prague Pictures

It was thirteen years ago this week that I journeyed for the first time to this magical city, where I pursued a steady diet of Czech vocabulary, long walks and the reading of an inordinate amount of literature.  While the language never stuck, and I have gone so far as to claim that it seemed cacophonous, the city and its eternal magnificence have never left my purview.  Prague marked the first of my many summers and years traveling on my own, an odd title since my family and I have been excessively nomadic, and it was in many ways the correct beginning.  Prague remains a delicate combination of spiraling towers, narrow streets, decadent bridges and squares, and a balance that does not belie its location at the very center of Europe.  You may gush in whatever platitudes you choose, but Prague is mysterious enough to attract the writer and the lover and tidy and precise enough for the politician and scientist.  And pieces of all these personae are embedded in this book. 

The presentation assumes the classic juxtaposition of the writer's present, the writer's past and the city's distant past – with, it should be said, no axis of continuity, a stratagem that turns out to be advantageous.  We begin when our author first traveled to Prague, shortly after he had written a novel set in that city about a renowned astronomer, but still frozen in that frozen war that provided ample excuses for cruelty, excess, and tyrannical force.  His mission?  To contraband to the United States works by a famous Czech photographer.  The recipient?  The son of a Czech intellectual who is described most sumptuously thus:

He was a tall, spare man with pale, short hair brushed neatly across a narrow forehead, a Nordic type unexpected this far to the south and east.  Impossible to tell his age; at first sight he might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty.  He was handsome, with that unblemished surface and Scandinavian features, yet curiously self-effacing, somehow.  Even as he stood before me I found it hard to get him properly into focus, as if a flaw had suddenly developed in the part of my consciousness that has the task of imprinting images upon the memory.  I think it was that he had spent so many years trying not to be noticed – by the authorities, by the police, by spies and informers – that a layer of his surface reality had worn away.  He had something of the blurred aspect of an actor who has just scrubbed off his make-up.

We may generalize this poor fellow into the typical Eastern Bloc sufferer, although Banville does indicate that many writers seem only to care in such situations about their counterparts ("Did [anyone] ... ever think to protest the imprisonment of a Russian street sweeper, or charlady, some poor nobody who had not even written a subversive poem but still ended up in prison?").  The Czech Professor mentioned above vanishes into Banville's recollection of some long and thirsty evenings with a few Czech students, and the strange and officious lies spread by young minds of various nationalities as to what precisely was going on in Eastern Europe.  There persists a lamentable misunderstanding of politics among artists that is so pervasive that it must be based on an idealized concept of human nature.  When Banville reports allegedly novel information an acquaintance has on the infamous Ceauşescu regime, he likens the despot's system to the mafia – which is akin to comparing a dragon to a large, winged fire-breathing reptile.  Why do some writers completely misconstrue politics?  Perhaps because politics, in its essence, is hideously banal since the only things that matter are power and money.  Conscientious politicians try to utilize both assets to achieve peace and prosperity – and I don't  think we need to review the anatomy of an unscrupulous politician.  In any case, Banville does seem to have once belonged to that caste of writer who believed atrocities were for Hitlers and not for Eastern European rulers or even, for that matter, South East Asian or Central African rulers.  What Banville doesn't, or perhaps didn't see at the time is that all evil empires, however miniature, will revolve around this power-and-money footrace, thinking it, for the connected and protected at least, a win-win situation.      

Against this rich setting Banville juxtaposes his own, rather clownish attendance at a few literary conferences in the present time but devotes most of the remaining pages to a few luminous characters in Prague's past.  While enumerating the regents of the period as required by the unstated laws of historical texts (one hopes that these laws will also become unused), Banville focuses his attention on two learned men, a "Great Dane" and a "little dog."  The nicknames are self-inflicted and demonstrate modern thought's preoccupation with the competition of scientific minds as well as the fallacy that the existence of a rival propels the human imagination to greater heights.  Brahe, being twenty-five years senior, will naturally be surpassed by his younger colleague, not only because science in its unending brilliance always progresses but also because Brahe is a noble and Kepler a commoner.  Their relationship to Prague can be investigated by any mediocre student, and Banville's account is buttressed by a handful of textbooks; why he felt we needed such a recapitulation, however entertainingly told, is not ours to worry.  Since I am not a Banville completist, I cannot comment on the overlap of his Kepler novel and the Kepler who aches to employ the highly advanced astronomical instruments Brahe hoards in some suburban estate.  I suppose that they are both equally accurate and equally fictionalized – which may remind the careful reader of the city in which all this action takes place.   

For all his style, Banville allows himself some regrettable comparisons ("As many have remarked, Catholicism and Communism have much in common"), and there prevails a certain disgust for religious traditions not nearly as evident in his other works.  Still, Banville is not blasphemous.  As he shapes a city that has endured an egregious amount of worship and suppression of faith, his tone in introducing a young lady or a building suggests a yearning for the years of beauty and enigma that each possesses.  He is not a tourist, nor a fool surfing in the gaudiest nightclub or faddish locale, nor an expert on anything in Prague except the sites associated with Kepler – and we may wonder how nugatory such knowledge really is.  Considering the distribution of his pages, one finds that Prague's past overshadows the present much like its most famous cathedral, and that the present is allotted so few entries in no small part because what Prague is today cannot be quantified in the riddles of yesteryear.  Unless, of course, you truly believe that life will remain undreamed by everyone but you.

Orientación de los gatos

A short story by Julio Cortázar ("The orientation of cats").  You can read the original here.

Whenever Alana and Osiris look at me I can complain neither of duplicity nor concealment.  They look at me head on, Alana with her bluish light and Osiris with his green rays.  They also look at one another this way, Alana stroking Osiris's black back which his nose and happy mouth reach from his milk bowl, woman and cat intimate on a level that eludes me, a level that my caresses cannot exceed.  It's been a while now since I renounced all control over Osiris – we're good friends at an unbreachable distance; but Alana is my wife and the distance between us is different, something that she doesn't seem to feel but which compromises my happiness whenever she looks at me, whenever she looks at me just like Osiris does and smiles or talks to me without the slightest reservation, every gesture and matter of hers handed over like love itself, as if her eyes comprised her entire body, a complete handover, uninterrupted reciprocity.

It's strange: although I have forsaken complete entry into Osiris's world, my love for Alana cannot accept the simplicity of closure, of always being together, of life without secrets.  Behind those blue eyes lies more; at the bottom of those words, those moans and those silences another kingdom, another Alana lives and breathes.  I've never told her this because I love her too much to dampen our superficial happiness, and besides, so many days, so many years have already passed.  In my way I am still trying to understand, to discover; I observe her without spying; I follow her without mistrust; I love a beautiful, mutilated statue, an unfinished text, a fragment of heaven written into the window of life.

There was a time when music seemed like my path to truth about Alana.  Looking at her I listened to the records of Bártok, Duke Ellington, and Gal Costa, and a gradual transparency took me deeper into her, the music uncloaked her in a different way, made her every time a little more like Alana because Alana could not only be this woman who had always looked at me fully without hiding a thing.  I looked against Alana, beyond Alana, in order to love her better.  And if music initially allowed me to espy other Alanas, the day came when I saw her change even more in front of an engraving by Rembrandt, as if a game of clouds in the sky had suddenly altered the chiaroscuro of a landscape.  I sensed that the painting carried her beyond herself in the eyes of the one observer who could notice the instantaneous metamorphosis never repeated, the view between Alana and Alana.  Involuntary intercessors – Keith Jarrett, Beethoven, and Aníbal Troilo – had helped me approach her, but facing a painting or engraving Alana still removed more of what I believed her to be.  She entered for a moment into an imaginary world so as to depart, without knowing it, from herself, moving from one painting to another, commenting on them then falling silent, a game of cards whereby every new thought merited stealthy and polite consideration.  A bit behind or by raising her arm,  Alana would follow queens and aces, spades and clubs.

What could be done with Osiris?  Give him milk, leave him curled up purring and happy in a black ball.  But Alana I could take to the picture gallery as I had yesterday, have her attend yet again a theater of mirrors and dark rooms, of tense images upon her body before that other image of light jeans and a red blouse which, after squashing a cigarette at the entrance, went from painting to painting, maintaining the exact distance that her look required, turning towards me now and again to comment or compare.  She would never have been able to discover that I was not there because of the paintings, that behind or beside her my way of looking at our surroundings had nothing to do with hers.  She would never realize that her slow and pensive step from painting to painting was changing her to such an extent that I was forced to close my eyes and struggle to keep myself from seizing her in my arms and delivering her to madness, to a mad race in the streets.  Relaxed and carefree in the naturalness of her pleasures and discovery, her highs and delays had been set to a different rhythm than mine, quite alien to the infuriating suppression of my thirst.

Until then everything had been a vague announcement, Alana in music, Alana before Rembrandt; but now my hopes began to become almost unbearable.  Since our arrival Alana had devoted herself to these paintings with the atrocious innocence of a chameleon, passing from one state to another without realizing that a crouching observer was lying in wait, looking in her posture, the inclination of her head, and the movement of her hands or lips for the interior chromatism coating her that would show her to be another, a state in which Alana was always being added to Alana, the cards piling up until the deck was full.  At her side, advancing little by little along the gallery walls, I walked and watched her engage herself in each painting, my eyes multiplying a flashing triangle made of her moving from painting to painting as points bound to me.  All of this was done to get back to her, to catch the change, the different halo which enveloped her one moment only to give way the next moment to a new aura, to a tonality which exposed her to a true and final unveiling.  It was impossible to foresee how long this osmosis would continue, how many new Alanas would ultimately be brought to me in the synthesis of the Alana whom the two of us, gorged on Alanas, would finally extract.  Of course, she would know nothing of this; she would simply light another cigarette and ask me to bring her a drink.  Whereas I would know that my long search had finally come to an end, that henceforth my love encompassed the visible and invisible, and I would accept Alana's clean gaze with no uncertainty of closed doors or forbidden passageways.

I saw her standing for a while and not moving before a lonely boat and an initial mass of black rock.  An imperceptible wave of her hands made her seem like she was swimming in the air, searching for the open sea, a flight towards the horizon.  I could not help finding it strange that another painting, in which a grille of acute dots prohibited access to a line of trees, made her step back as if looking for a certain vantage point.  And all of a sudden she was repulsed, having reached an unacceptable limit.  Birds, sea monsters, windows giving on to silence and letting in a simulacrum of death, every new painting destroyed Alana, depriving her of her previous color, ripping from her the modulations of liberty, of flight, of great open spaces, affirming her denial of night and nothingness, her fear of sunlight, her almost terrible impulse of the phoenix.  I stayed back knowing that I wouldn't be able to tolerate her gaze, her curious surprise when she looked me in the eye and saw bedazzled confirmation.  Because this was also what I was, this was my project Alana, my life Alana, this had been what I wanted and what was contained by a present time of city and parsimony, then now at last Alana, at last Alana and I from now on, from this very moment.  I would have liked to take her naked in my arms, love her in such a way that she would have no doubts and all would be said forever between us.  And from this endless night of love would emerge the first dawn of a new life for us who had known so many dawns already.

We arrived at the final exhibit in the gallery.  I moved closer to the exit, all the while hiding my face and hoping that the air and lights in the street would bring back what Alana knew of me.  I saw her stop before a painting whose view had been blocked by other visitors.  She stayed there for a long time without budging, gazing at the picture of a window and a cat.  One last transformation made her into a statue cleanly separated from all the others, from me who was now approaching indecisively, looking for her lost eyes amidst her form.  I noticed that the cat was identical to Osiris and that it was gazing at something far away which the window wall did not let us see.  Completely unmoving and deep in thought was the cat, yet still not as motionless as Alana.  Somehow I sensed that the triangle had been broken; when Alana turned her head towards me the triangle no longer existed.  She had gone into the picture but had not come back.  From the other, betrayed side she continued looking beyond the window where no one could see what they could see, what only Alana and Osiris could see every time they looked right at me.

Shutter Island

The name of this film could be heard with certain accents as "shudder," which would dovetail nicely with its explicit content.  "Shutter," in any case, is far better since it suggests furtive glances through a convenient window from where one sees what one is not normally entitled to see although hardly enough to form a fair conclusion.  This conceit has fueled dozens of films, tragically pigeonholed as voyeurism by computerized reviewers, yet it remains such a basic premise as to allow for new versions that do not simply echo their inspirations.  And our reinvention comes from a thirtysomething U.S. marshal by the name of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio).

We first see Teddy violently seasick aboard a ferry to the titular isle which houses a mental institution with the repute and splendid isolation of Alcatraz.  Once he has righted himself and gained the deck, we notice the beauty that surrounds him – the cresting water, the scudding clouds, the lone boat heading into eternity.  His dress and speech as he accosts his fellow marshal on the assignment, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), indicates we are not in the present time; further details tell us the year is 1954.  The fact is important not only because it explains why smoking is the third most common on-screen action after breathing and talking, but also owing to Teddy's G.I. memories of the liberation of Dachau.  The flashbacks to that time, including a visionary scene in the quarters of the camp's commanding officer, will provide Teddy with his superimposed daydreams and eventually with nightly tortures.  His horrible narrative ("There were too many bodies to count.  There were too many bodies to imagine.") literally bleeds into his current predicament, the localization of a missing young murderess called Rachel Solando.  Teddy believes in Rachel Solando, in what she is said to have done, in the existence of a place like Shutter Island because he has had first-hand experience in what human beings can do to one another.  To him and perforce to us, there seem to be few boundaries to wickedness. 

Solando's evil will be as repulsive as the evils of any war, only on a smaller and more personal scale.  She apparently drowned her three small children in a lake; apart from vague allusions to her mental unwellness, the reason why she did so is never made explicit.  A gentle excuse ("her husband died on the shores of Normandy") is circulated but never condoned.  Although the institution is a technological fortress flush with armed correctional officers and an atmosphere of, well, more than brooding suspicion, Solando is said to have escaped a locked cell barefoot without leaving a trace.   Thankfully, Teddy and Aule do not examine the room too closely perhaps because they are too busy scrutinizing the wisdom and manners of Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley).  Cawley will resemble many other heads of mental institutions in his complacent geniality, as well as the supposition shared by him and everyone else that he is much smarter than you are.  He is parentally proud of Ashecliffe, the actual name of the institution, as "a moral fusion between law and order and clinical care."  Such a slogan may appear either absurd or self-evident depending on how you define morality; but to an intelligent person it should not come off as intimidating – which is, of course, exactly how Teddy takes it.  In fact, as Cawley offers a limited tour of two of the three wards, Teddy begins to sense that something is awry.  It is at this point that Aule coaxes the truth out of him: he is not really here to find Rachel Solando, who may or may not exist, but to confirm whether Andrew Laeddis, the incendiary responsible for the death of Teddy's wife Dolores (Michelle Williams), is indeed housed in the third and completely off-limits ward for the supremely dangerous and unstable.   

My non-disclosure policy prevents me from revealing much more, but the attentive viewer should ask himself the following.  Why do the names Solando and Laeddis sound so odd?  Can we really believe Teddy's account of what happened to the Dachau guards?  Is the film's etymology of the German word for "dream" correct?  How would Teddy, a very intelligent but not a cultured man, immediately recognize a piece by this composer?  And, as Teddy himself is asked, what is "the rule of four" and why would intelligence agencies consult a psychiatrist like Dr. Cawley?  Through all these investigations, Teddy never leaves our sight: he is our compass and chart, and it is incumbent upon us to judge everything he sees and feels.  Upon researching some bits and pieces to Shutter Island, I learned that DiCaprio in his acting career has received three Academy Award and seven Golden Globe nominations.  Not that nominations are a surefire way to measure talent, but given his accepted status as a boyish charmer the number is still remarkable.  As it were, DiCaprio's effectiveness as Teddy Daniels is contingent upon Daniels' biography: a highly-decorated war veteran but still a kid; a once-raging alcoholic with violent tendencies; a German speaker who mistrustfully addresses the sinister Jeremiah Naehring (Max von Sydow), one of Cawley's colleagues, in that language; and a young man full of love and despair.  DiCaprio looks and plays the part so smoothly – his German heritage and good accent making him all the more convincing in his GI role – that we are loath to disparage him for some of his frankly unsubstantiated accusations.  So when he jabs at Cawley with the scornful "you act like insanity is catching," he may not be terribly far from the truth.  Too bad the truth may be light years from him.  

Six Degrees Could Change the World

An earlier version of this essay appeared on another site.

Schoolbooks tell us that the Second Industrial Revolution occurred around the advent of the steam engine, about one hundred fifty years ago.  What these books often fail to mention is the human and ecological cost of such advancements.  Now we live in a world of plastics and mass production, of artificial heat and ventilation, of power, locomotion and wireless computers – all of which makes for a much easier existence than that of our forebears.  And as in any pact with uncontrollable and unknown forces who offer us success, we will one day be asked to pay our debts.  Consequently, for those of us who use the otherwise innocuous Celsius scale, this film may come as a surprise. 

It is a docu-dramatization of the work of a British scientist whose publications have gained him both notoriety and what he really wants, more attention to the warming of our planet.  That the globe is but 0.8 degrees C (1.44 F) hotter than it once was would not appear to be an alarming change; much more violent fluctuations in worldwide temperature have been theorized as far back in time as scientists can delve.  What is alarming, however, is the rate at which these changes have been occurring.  It used to be that a degree or two of climatic vacillation would take place over thousands or millions of years, thus dissipating its potential effects on the environment (even the mighty ice ages were creeping, almost imperceptible affairs); now calculations are in decades or even calendar years.  So if I were to claim that since the middle of the nineteenth century we have spurned the earth's riches in favor of synthetic, industrial greed I would not only be expressing my political opinion, I would be announcing a crisis.

The crisis in question can be measured, as it were, by degrees.  According to Lynas, one degree Celsius of change, a figure we are steadily approaching owing to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, would continue to bring milder winters to places like England, now a burgeoning vineyard.  Such changes have occurred before in the world's history and have allowed unlikely countries to grow unusual crops, but these lands have then in time reverted to more homeostatic temperatures.  At two degrees about a fifth of the world's trees (especially in wetter places such as rainforests) are predicted to perish along with most of the coral reefs that regulate life beneath and around much of our increasingly acidic ocean waters.  At two degrees Greenland's glaciers, whose size has fluctuated gradually every 150,000 years or so, would melt to such an extent as to raise tides around the world and endanger seafront property.  Up to two degrees Lynas suggests that we can handle the changes, however radical they may be at times, and slowly reduce the temperature through conservation of emissions.  But in life as in art, significance first comes at three. 

At three degrees the climatic changes we would regularly witness might revive our memories of the terrible heat wave that spread across Europe in the summer of 2003, an event that killed thousands in a matter of weeks.  It is forgotten because few people feel bad for Europeans (or, for that matter, Americans) when they are stricken by natural disaster, a much more commonplace occurrence in less temperate climates.  This tidbit is hardly a coincidence: there lurks a strange collation between hotter weather and greater financial deprivation.  With Europe's GDP on average being three times that of the world's average and its continent almost completely bereft of extreme winters or summers, hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes, what would happen at four degrees more?  "A Scandinavian beach would become the next Saint-Tropez."  This may sound like a great plot for an ecological thriller – a Swedish energy mogul using the highest of technologies to augment the greenhouse effect and become the richest man in the world – except that it could very well happen without such diabolism.

At five and six degrees we are not expected to be able to survive.  That is to say, we may physically exist, but our planet will more closely resemble the dystopian deserts so common in science fiction, worlds without water, without rules and without hope.  Every disaster movie in which you have seen the world implode, every scenario you wished would never occur – all this is the future of ecological abuse.  Awarded a gallery of trophies in his native England and abroad, Lynas’s book contains research that supports the work of advocates such as Senator Al Gore and other high-profile altruists who should not have to warn us twice. And Six Degrees Could Change the World plays out exactly like a disaster movie, down to the computer-generated effects, except that this is no longer the bailiwick of fiction writers but of actual science.  Nevertheless, our warnings come still in time.  In the last twenty years we have made progress, and recycling and conservation in many parts of the world is prolific and protected by legislation.  How ironic that life has come to resemble the art that once offered it escape and imaginary doomsday scenarios that would end as soon as the lights came on in the theater.  A couple of hours of apocalyptic mayhem, but then the open, fresh air and carefree life – such was the world once upon a time.  Let us hope that future generations do not have to escape to the movies to experience it.