Lost to the world for several millennia, Gilgamesh reappeared in 1853, when an archeological team in present-day Iraq discovered a collection of broken clay tablets containing a long poem that predated the Bible and the Homeric epics by as many as 1000 years.
With the uptick in stronger storms, hotter forest fires, rising sea levels and more, I can’t help but think the tune we’ve been hearing for some time—that we can engineer a better world and outwit mother nature—might be a little overplayed.
William Blake possessed an erratic imagination that serves as a fascinating example of how a literary artist can forges new modes of expression in order to stand before the shifting reality in which they live.
One of the many things I have found so moving and gripping about classical Japanese literature is how concrete the worldview is. Here is a sensibility that is deeply enmeshed in the world and looks for beauty in the imperfections of nature, in the corrosive effects of time.
With origins dating back more than two thousand years, the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata began as a collection of myths and stories that over the course of several centuries, came to be unified in a meandering and wildly digressive work.
Though Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork is neither a warning nor a statement of climate change, it is an imaginative and aesthetic example of how modern fiction can look beyond the confines of characters’ internal worlds to grapple with forces beyond our control.
If we cut through the soft, friendly Emerson, we find that for all its optimism and apparent naivety, Emerson’s work is immersed in a mature, tragic vision that asks us to confront the mean aspects of life, the inherent limitations and necessary failures we all must face.
Tragedy opens up aesthetic possibilities, allowing suprahuman forces to partake as literary subjects that overwhelm individual characters. It is a mode of expression that goes beyond what realistic fiction can provide.
In thinking about climate change, we can take a lesson from those masters of the absurd—Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett—to conjure uncanny and grotesque situations that, more than a realistic or scientific view, may come closer to expressing the contradictions that make up our world.
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