MosesWrites
All the torrents going into the sea, and the sea not full: to the place the torrents going, there they turn back to go.
—Ecclesiastes 1:7
Two hydrogen atoms and one of oxygen and then, life.
Yet when many of those molecules together long frozen on a mountain peak fall thousands of meters into a valley a seismic force releases destruction of a Biblical magnitude.
When I wrote my 2020 reflection on Covid, contagion and containment, I ended with a warning about how small of a crisis that would seem compared with unfolding climate catastrophe.
Ten years earlier in my final year of graduate school I summarized years of reading and reflection in “Who Counts?” and I ended with my worry that our days may be numbered.
I fear many may have taken that as a clever turn of phrase and not a dire warning.
I have for well over twenty years attempted to fathom the indescribable hell that has been stored away in our atmosphere since the industrial revolution and vastly accelerated since the Second World War.
I fear too that many now with great power actually yearn in millenarian fantasy for revelation of a new world order. They are as a second snake in the garden.
Those good swift rivers of New England that birthed the industrial might of the United States formed from glacial retreat and ice may well again take them over. The great peninsulas of down east Maine where I played as a child, the pine forests used for ships, the cod that fed Iberians as they prayed with silver and gold extracted from the new world, gone. Swept away, in a flash.
Perhaps we can welcome AI overlords who find a way through yet I doubt much would survive a flood like that in Nepal.
I always wondered at the cheerful storybook depiction of Noah’s Arc that my grandmother encouraged me to read in the face of my grandfather’s militant atheism and my parents’ wishy-washy Unitarian Universalism.
Doesn’t this mean god kills every other living creature on the planet?
Not a comforting story.
All great texts of faith entail infinite worlds beyond the idiotic literal readings to which so many adhere, as if the complexity of the universe could get spelled out in sentences or equations. We think we know so much yet at best we grasp in darkness.
Time has many dimensions and simple-minded linear, directional assumptions have warped us in recent centuries. At the end of my first year at Reed in Humanities 110 we read Augustine’s Confessions and that’s the closest I’ve come to having my head explode. Sharing my wonder and despair a smart interlocutor said well, that’s about right.
All of us as Billy Pilgrim have become unstuck in time.
As I move to the edge of the earth, where the sea meets the desert, I hope my work can inspire a revolution in how young people learn so that they can better prepare themselves for challenges ahead.
I fear Nepal as a harbinger for far worse and I can only hope we can awaken and prepare in earnest so that civilization may endure, as I’ve little interest in barbarism. Far more than artificial intelligence, we will require very real humanistic learning and faith and creativity and a willingness to question long-held assumptions about nature and the nature of our world. All that must be done with a desire for peace and in a spirit of love. Now. Nothing else matters. Now. Now. Now.
Aboard CX749, 30 August 2026