Wandering, particularly within urban spaces and typically in the romanticized, intellectual mode of Baudelaire, is a trope that many writers return to. It seems that so much can be seen and felt on these isolated treks. I do my best thinking while in motion—ever since I was a child, I would slip into a shifted mental plane when moving where stories would come more easily than when I sat motionless in front of a blank sheet of paper. As I grew older, however, and found myself walking city streets on evenings when the days were short and cold, I would often set out, only to find myself the lone person on the street. R.O. Kwon recently wrote in The Paris Review about the reality of being a woman walking alone: choosing certain streets over others, parking as close to your destination as possible, and sometimes, alternatively, paying for a cab when where you want to go is within walking distance. The concept of “freedom of movement” assumes that one’s body is accepted in the space it wants to move through, and that one’s body has a safe place to rest once it is done with its wandering. On the other hand, for some, wandering is less an activity for leisure or intellectual exploration than a means of survival.
I used to live with many others in the cliffs above a flooded seaside resort. I found the book by chance when exploring an attic above the waterline. I’ve been poring over it since: Lost Objects, a collection of stories by Marian Womack. The book has changed me. What intrigues me so much about it is the way that, though it was written very early in the drawn-out throes of the planet (I write now from the depredated future, unsure for whom I am writing or why), it seems uncannily prescient. Lost Objects differs from other fictions of ecological collapse from those early days in its subtlety. In these stories, climatic change is not figured as dramatic upheaval, but slow creep. You see, the problem with climate change literature was that it was difficult to shape potent fiction from what was an incremental process, with none of the inherent drama of nuclear holocaust, virulent disease, plagues of sores, giant hailstones, or seas of blood. Things deteriorated so slowly. Of course, there were warnings, but too few heeded them. To overcome the flat narrative trajectory of climatological disaster, writers addressing it tended to give their ecological crises an unlikely urgency and violence, to conform to human expectations of plot, or to set their fictions in compelling and alien aftermaths. They were also generally tied to an anthropocentric perspective, more interested in the psychological metamorphoses of human beings under apocalyptic pressure — reducing the catastrophe to a catalyst for human change — rather than change on a universal scale.
As digital data systems continue to expand, our human memories seem more anecdotal than ever. Transcultural communication reveals the subjectivity of our local thought systems with intensifying clarity. The analogies we use to move between cultures and disciplines, or between artificial intelligence and human consciousness, come to seem ever more far-fetched, like metaphors. To float in seas of such associative, anecdotal knowledge can make one feel passive. Blumenberg describes the appeal of this mode of thinking in ways that humble but also empower his reader. He helps us see its philosophical usefulness without obscuring its limits. Lions and Blumenberg lead us into his writing with gentle whimsy. Hopefully, they will inspire readers to reach for his more challenging works as well.