Colson Whitehead, The Apocalypse, & My Son
Or: January, For Some Reason
The year feels old for being so young. A Benjamin Button analogy looms somewhere, but that would suggest we’re trending in a direction of innocence and bliss...and I guess I have my doubts.
Here’s Colson Whitehead’s response to the New York Times when asked about his hopes and predictions for the year:
I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the Earth. Villains triumph and the innocents suffer. I imagine these trends will continue.
It’s hard to tell if this is a wholly sincere statement, or if Whitehead is in part trolling the article’s premise as trite or unserious. If it’s the latter, he succeeds. If it’s the former, he can be accused of sounding glib or pessimistic or performative, but he can’t be accused of getting the facts wrong. Humanity is disappointing. Villains do triumph while the innocent suffer. Strictly speaking, we haven’t quite killed the Earth yet — that will require more competence and coordination — but we’re certainly doing all we can to kill ourselves.
So Whitehead is right. There will be more violence, more fires, more farce. These trends will continue, and always have.
The question is speed, or more accurately, acceleration. Are the events which make up these trends occurring at a faster rate? And what would that mean?
In 1863, Charles Baudelaire wrote his seminal essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in which he equated this strange new idea, “modernity,” with “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” In the art world, modernity signaled a stark break from classicism and the Old Masters, and in one sense Baudelaire’s essay functioned as a Trojan horse, a way to justify the eccentric painting of his eccentric friends, later derided as “Impressionists.”
Still, the hustle and bustle which Baudelaire saw all along the boulevards and alleyways of Second Empire Paris must’ve felt genuinely novel. By the time he published his essay, Baudelaire had lived through three political upheavals, with the latest attempt at a republic only lasting a few years before its president, the nephew of Napoleon, declared himself emperor. Shortly after he turned thirty, most of the Paris of Baudelaire’s youth was demolished to make way for the city’s urban renewal program.
Still, compare how time was experienced in nineteenth-century France with, say, the fifth chapter of Genesis. The descendants of Adam lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, but their biographies can be summarized in a few dozen words.
When Enoch had lived for sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah for three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.
Thus Enoch, and thus all of Adam’s line until Noah. No one knows why we only have bare outlines of these figures or what was going on while they were alive. Maybe the moral of the story, or lack thereof, is that the longer you live, the less likely anyone will remember much about you. Whether we experience life as fast or slow, weirdly long or surprisingly brief — or both — eventually time eclipses detail until all we have is an impression.
Amid all the other wild events of January 2025, my son turned one and was baptized. While the priest prayed over the rite, but before she could dab any water on his globular, iridescent head, he swiped at and nearly stole the ceremonial pitcher, as if he, too, understood the urgency of the situation.
Some brief notes.
In December, I put Sault’s Acts of Faith among my favorite albums of 2024. At the time, it was only available via YouTube, which was suboptimal and probably discouraged many of you from listening. Good news! It’s now available on Bandcamp and Spotify, where it was released on Christmas Day (a real move). It’s worth your attention!
The album I am listening to now is Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal. In fact, I cannot stop listening to this album. Like — what is going on here? What is he doing with his voice? Is this Tom Waits doing a Justin Vernon impression? Astral Weeks as performed by the guy from New Radicals? Is this a perfect album? I need to keep listening.
I managed to do some reading at the end of the year.
I read Small Things Like These and The Wood in Midwinter, the former a novella and the latter a short story, because it’s good to keep things simple the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
I also read All Fours, which no one wants to hear my opinion about, and which I don’t have an noteworthy opinion about anyway. (I liked it fine!)
I also read Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood’s 2017 memoir, which is nominally focused on her Catholic priest father (!) but mostly serves as a comic family reckoning.
Lockwood — a poet, novelist, and critic — writes as a sort of lapsed Flannery O’Connor, chronicling the mysteries and manners of “all the worst cities of the Midwest.” Meanwhile her father Greg resembles a grown-up Ignatius J. Reilly, who in this version of reality has escaped the miasma of Canal Street only to settle near a radioactive landfill outside of St. Louis. Like Reilly, Greg Lockwood enjoys yelling at the TV and cursing the hedonism of modernity. But also like Reilly, he contains multitudes. For instance, he loves classic rock and spends an ordinate amount of time playing loud, inchoate riffs on his collection of electric guitars (which it doesn’t seem he can afford) in a way that’s “not bad, exactly” but “makes you doubt your version of reality.”
Still the most memorable character of the book is Lockwood’s mother. Lots of chapters have been written this century, but surely Lockwood’s story about an ill-fated hotel experience with her mom, entitled “The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place,” must rank in the top three or four.