Sunday, November 15, 2015

Kathhryn Schulz in the New Yorker magazine on the emergence of ''cli-fi'' in modern literature [with Paolo Bacigalupi's 'THE WATER KNIFE' added by blogger]]

A Critic at Large

                     November 23, 2015 Issue

Writers in the Storm

 
*** Said one Canadian wit after reading this piece in the New Yorker site:
 
"Canadians ALWAYS do the weather!"
 

How weather went from symbol to science and back again.

By


11_23_15
Table of Contents
Very nice magazine illustration by Aude Van Ryn

“No weather will be found in this book,” Mark Twain declared in the opening pages of his 1992 novel “The American Claimant.” He has determined to do without it, he explains, on the ground that it usually just gets in the way of the story. “Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it,” he writes, “because of delays on account of the weather.”
 
Twain was not alone in mistrusting meteorological activity in fiction. As literary subjects go, weather has a terrible reputation. More precisely, it has two terrible reputations that do not get along. On the one hand, weather is widely regarded as the most banal topic in the world—in print as in conversation, the one we resort to when we have nothing else to say. On the other hand, it stands perpetually accused of melodrama. “It was a dark and stormy night,” begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel “Paul Clifford,” which goes on to invoke torrential rain, gusting wind, guttering lamplight, and rattling rooftops: weather as plot, setting, star, and supporting cast of what is, by broad consensus, the worst sentence in the history of English literature.
Melodramatic or banal prose mostly gets blamed on the author, reasonably enough. But melodrama and banality are aesthetic judgments, and, as such, they are sometimes also products of their context. Twain was writing in the late nineteenth century, a time when the field of meteorology was belatedly coming into its own. With that scientific model of weather in ascendance, the literary models came to seem suspect. Weather facts served to make weather fictions seem overwrought, while the newly empirical understanding of the atmosphere—and, more staggering at the time, the ability to predict its behavior—made weather itself seem suddenly more prosaic.
That was the context in which Twain joked about eradicating weather from his work. But even he conceded that “weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience.” Through the ages, we have used weather in our stories to illuminate the workings of our universe, our culture, our politics, our relationships, and ourselves. Before “The American Claimant” was published, sans weather, you might as easily have searched the canon for a novel without adverbs. Twain was likely correct when he called his weatherless book “the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature.”
Twain died in 1910, too soon to discover that his joke turned out to be borderline prophetic. After maintaining its centrality in Western literature for millennia, weather, while by no means vanishing entirely, faded in importance in the twentieth century. Only in our own time are we seeing it return in significant ways to our stories—thanks, as it happens, to the same forces that drove it away in the first place.
Storms sent to punish, lightning to frighten, thunder to humble, floods to obliterate: across nearly all cultures, the first stories that we told about weather were efforts to explain it, and the explanations invariably came down to divine agency. From the bag of winds gifted to Aeolus to the Biblical drought visited on Jerusalem, meteorological phenomena first appear in the narrative record as tools used by deities to battle one another and to help or hinder humans.

Early religions distributed those tools profligately. In Greek mythology, the wind alone was apportioned among more than a dozen gods, goddesses, nymphs, and demons—to say nothing of Zeus, who ruled the sky, and Poseidon, who could stir up storms. But, with the rise of monotheism, dominion over the elements was consolidated into a single God, and bad weather, like suffering and death, became one of those things which we brought down on ourselves through sin. In Eden, the climate was perfectly temperate. Only after the banishment of Adam and Eve did God—in the words of Milton, in “Paradise Lost”—“affect the Earth with cold and heat / Scarce tolerable,” and summon “ice / And snow and haile and stormie gust.”
Meteorology would never entirely shed these religious undertones; even the eminently dry and secular field of contract law continues to call an unexpected weather event an “act of God.” But by the time that Milton was writing, in the mid-seventeenth century, the role of weather in literature was shifting. While our earliest weather stories tried to explain meteorological phenomena, subsequent ones used meteorological phenomena to explain ourselves. Weather, in other words, went from being mythical to being metaphorical. In a symbolic system that is now so familiar as to be intuitive, atmospheric conditions came to stand in for the human condition.
That symbolic use of weather is the subject of Alexandra Harris’s “Weatherland” (Thames & Hudson), a forthcoming history of weather in English literature. “My subject is not the weather itself,” she writes, “but the weather as it is daily recreated in the human imagination.” Her survey begins with an astute observation: weather works so well as a symbol partly because its literal manifestation is oddly slippery. “Meteorological phenomena are serially elusive,” she writes. “Winds and air-fronts reveal their characters only in the effects they have on other things.” A breeze sends smoke drifting northward from a chimney; a thermal betrays itself in the effortless upward trajectory of a hawk; low temperatures make themselves visible as our breath hanging in the air. Weather, one of the most potent forces in our lives, is often imperceptible, perpetually changing, and frequently mysterious.

As Harris points out, all of this makes it a convenient substitute for another “serially elusive” phenomenon: the self. King Lear, Shakespeare tells us, was “minded like the weather”—as charged and turbulent as the storm that raged around him on the heath. In a way, we have all been minded like the weather ever since, so accustomed have we become to using meteorology to describe mental activity. Minds are foggy (unless they are experiencing a brainstorm), temperaments sunny, attitudes chilly; moods blow in and out. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud; Robert Frost, in “Tree at My Window,” explicitly compared outer and inner weather. Harris draws particular attention to the association between minds and clouds, from the cumulus shape of the cartoon thought bubble to the early Christian belief that Adam’s mind was made from a pound of clouds. She might also have cited Sartre, who memorably described consciousness as “a wind blowing from nowhere toward the world.”

As a set of symbols, weather also blows toward the world; we use it to describe not only ourselves but our private relationships and our societies as a whole. Nabokov characterized his marriage to Véra Slonim with a one-word emotional-weather report: “cloudless.” Emily Brontë conjured the opposite kind of relationship in “Wuthering Heights.” When we first meet Catherine Earnshaw, she is a ghostly hand rapping on a window in a storm—which is to say, she is essentially the storm itself, rattling the glass panes of her former home. At every point thereafter, emotional drama and atmospheric drama are one. If Lear is minded like the weather, Catherine and Heathcliff are bodied like it—together, the most famous storm ever to strike the Yorkshire moors.
Six years later and two hundred miles to the southeast, Dickens summoned vastly drearier conditions for “Bleak House”—which, outside of the Book of Revelation, might have the most consistently dreadful weather of any work of Western literature. “It rains for the first twelve chapters,” Harris notes, “before pausing and raining again.” The skies are further blackened by soot and smoke—in Dickens’s words, “gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” Fog smothers the city. The mud is so abundant that it is “as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”; in what may be the only dinosaur cameo in Victorian literature, Dickens imagines a forty-foot Megalosaurus slogging through it up Holborn Hill.
Much of this (though not the dinosaur) reflected a reality of contemporaneous London, where clouds mixed with soot from the unregulated chimneys of the early industrial era to darken clothes, lungs, and skies. Yet the weather in “Bleak House” is unmistakably symbolic: the mud is that of a hopelessly sullied culture, the fog that of an opaque and unnavigable legal system. As in earlier, religious stories, meteorology here is morality, and the prevailing conditions leave everything hidden, murky, and stained. Lest anyone miss the point, Dickens names his saintly heroine Esther Summerson.
This kind of heavy-handed meteorological symbolism was not to everyone’s liking. To be specific, it was not to the liking of John Ruskin, the most influential critic in the nineteenth century. In 1856, in the third volume of “Modern Painters,” Ruskin criticized writers for attributing human emotions to the natural world, a tendency that he famously termed the pathetic fallacy. (“Pathetic,” in this context, refers to pathos, and the fallacy to something sham; the phrase might best be translated from the Victorian as “emotional falseness.”) The sun does not shine mercilessly, Ruskin insisted, and the skies have never once wept, and, Dickens notwithstanding, fog cannot be found “cruelly pinching the toes and fingers” of a little apprentice boy. “It is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer,” Ruskin argued, “to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact ”—on the “ordinary, proper, and true appearance of things.”

Ruskin was reacting in part to sentimental literature and gothic novels, in which every dewdrop and tree limb was apt to quiver with human emotion. But he was also motivated by his own unusual attentiveness to the natural world—and, in particular, to its weather. “Modern Painters” includes scores of chapters on rain, mist, clouds, lightning, sunlight, and storms, and it dwells at length on the fidelity, or lack thereof, with which artists render the sky. Ruskin’s own commitment to fidelity was impressive: he once stood outside on a winter morning and counted the cirrus clouds above him—all fifty thousand of them. His first public talk, given when he was eighteen, was on the color and formation of alpine clouds. He delivered another speech two years later, in 1839, on the “Present State of Meteorological Science” to the Meteorological Society of London.
That society, founded sixteen years earlier, was the first of its kind in the world. Ruskin was resisting the personification of weather and insisting on the “pure facts” of it just at the moment in history when those facts were becoming known. In his speech, he called on those who loved meteorology to “zealously come forward to deprecate the apathy with which it has long been regarded.” The society of meteorologists, he continued, “wishes its influence and its power to be omnipotent over the globe, so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere at every point on its surface.”

It would take the better part of a century, but that vision eventually became a reality. What Ruskin did not predict, however (though it might have pleased him), was that the rise of an empirical model of weather would occasion the decline of the symbolic one—and, with it, the over-all decline of weather in literature.
Ruskin was right to note that meteorology lagged far behind other sciences, though he might have gone on to observe that there were good reasons for the delay. It is harder to study things in the air than things on the ground, harder to study things that change rapidly than things that change slowly, if at all, and nearly impossible to study a global system such as weather in the absence of any kind of real-time global communications. As a result, weather science got almost nowhere in the two thousand years between Aristotle’s mostly erroneous Meteorologica, written sometime around 350 B.C., and the development of the telegraph, in the eighteen-forties.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, then, nearly everything about weather remained a mystery. No one understood the wind. No one knew why temperatures dropped as you climbed closer to the sun. No one could explain how clouds, with their countless tons of rainwater, somehow remained suspended in midair. No one knew what caused lightning, or why it tended to strike the tallest thing around—a problem for Christian meteorology, since it appeared that God had a special propensity for destroying church steeples. No one even knew what the sky was made of. Above all, no one knew what it was likely to do next. In 1854, when the Irish barrister John Ball suggested to the House of Commons that one day “we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather twenty-four hours beforehand,” he drew incredulous laughter.

That anecdote appears in Peter Moore’s “The Weather Experiment” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), an account of the rise of modern meteorology. A huge cast of characters brought that field into being, but Moore, while giving them their due, focusses chiefly on Robert FitzRoy, a British naval officer and a towering figure in the history of meteorology. Among other achievements, FitzRoy improved the barometer, pioneered the use of statistics to track the weather, created Britain’s storm-warning system, and established the government bureau that would later become the Met Office, the British equivalent of the National Weather Service. He is best known, however, for something he did in his capacity as a ship’s captain: in 1831, while casting about for someone to keep him company on an upcoming voyage to South America, he met and invited along a young naturalist named Charles Darwin.
Moore observes a nice parallel: just as Darwin sought to explain the past, FitzRoy sought to explain the future—or, anyway, the portion of it that pertained to the weather. Given the prevailing belief that God reigned over the earth and the sky, both lines of inquiry were unpopular. Even meteorologists struggled to reconcile their profession with their faith. In 1838, William Reid, a British engineer who devoted himself to the study of hurricanes after witnessing the destruction they wrought in the Caribbean, felt compelled to publicly affirm his belief that the laws of nature were “designed by incomprehensible wisdom, arranged by supreme power, and tending to the most benevolent ends.” FitzRoy, a devout Christian, ultimately rejected Darwin’s work, at the expense of the friendship. Yet his own study contributed as much as anyone’s to the forging of a new narrative about the weather—one as different from earlier accounts as Darwinism is from the creation story. Thanks in no small part to FitzRoy’s influence, religious explanations of weather gave way to empirical ones, and “the heavens” gradually turned into “the atmosphere”: a place that could be subjected, like an island full of finches, to scientific inquiry.
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That shift in terminology was telling. Early meteorologists not only developed an entirely new story about the weather; they developed a new language to describe it. Prior to the nineteenth century, Moore writes, those trying to make sense of the weather “had no linguistic framework to scientifically explain what they saw.” He quotes a Worcestershire diarist, writing in 1703: “Our Language is exceeding scanty & barren of words to use & express ye various notions I have of Weather &c. I tire myself with Pumping for apt terms & similes to illustrate my Thoughts.”

The real problem, though, was not too few words but too many. One could describe the weather in any number of ways (that diarist characterized skies as, among other things, “loaded, “varnished,” “bloated,” “pendulous,” and “like a tall fresco ceiling”), but the terms had no consistent and universal meaning. The problem had been identified as early as 1663, when the British polymath Robert Hooke, who later coined the word “cell” (in its biological sense), proposed a uniform vocabulary for describing clouds. His terms, unsurprisingly, did not stick. “Let Water’d, signify a Sky that has many high thin & small clouds looking almost like waterd tabby, calld in some places a maccarell sky from the Resemblance it has to the spots on the Backs of those fishes,” Hooke suggested. He also recommended categorizing certain clouds as “hairy.”
It took a hundred and forty years, the influence of Linnaeus, and at least one other rival plan (by the misguided evolutionary theorist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) for a universal taxonomy of weather to catch on. In 1803, the British pharmacist Luke Howard suggested that clouds be described as cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus—the Latin words for “curl,” “layer,” “mass,” and “rain.” Two years later, Francis Beaufort, a British naval officer frustrated by the idiosyncratic weather descriptions recorded at sea, proposed twelve standardized gradations of wind strength, from “calm” to “hurricane”: the Beaufort scale. FitzRoy himself contributed perhaps the most significant weather term of all: “forecast.”
It is difficult, in our era of tornado watches and storm warnings, to appreciate how catastrophic the weather could be before we had any ability to forecast it. More than eight thousand people died in Britain’s Great Storm of 1703, as did fifteen thousand grazing sheep when the storm surge hit the River Severn. (We know as much as we do about the calamity thanks to Daniel Defoe, who chronicled it in scrupulous detail in his 1704 book, “The Storm.” Widely credited as the father of the modern novel, Defoe also pioneered the genre of the modern disaster narrative.) Things were no better a century and a half later and across the pond; in 1869, there were 1,914 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes alone. Not coincidentally, the ship-salvage industry was instrumental in lobbying against early weather forecasting. Partly owing to its influence, the British government effectively eliminated FitzRoy’s position at the Meteorological Department shortly after his death, and suspended his two major innovations—weather forecasts and storm warnings—until scientific and public outcry sufficed to get them reinstated. Weather still wreaks havoc, but the rise of forecasting has saved untold numbers of lives, to say nothing of ships, crops, money, picnics, horse races, and weddings.

Quite aside from its practical value, the advent of forecasting indicated that meteorology had finally matured. As anyone in a long-term relationship knows, the more thoroughly you understand a system, the better you can predict how it is likely to behave. Mythological and religious explanations of weather not only failed at prediction but excluded it as a possibility; you cannot accurately forecast the caprice of Zeus, or the will of an omnipotent God. By contrast, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, every accurate forecast served as evidence in favor of the new model of weather. (It is easy, these days, to kvetch about the inaccuracy of forecasts, but such complaints are relative. Weather remains imperfectly predictable, and probably always will be—meteorology is the field that gave us chaos theory—but we take for granted just how good prediction has become. It is one thing not to know where Hurricane Joaquin will make landfall, and something else entirely not to know that it exists until it strikes.) By the beginning of the twentieth century, forecasting was commonplace, meteorologists had cracked most major atmospheric phenomena, and the empirical model of weather had become, as Ruskin had hoped, “omnipotent over the globe.”

In the visual arts, the rise of this new model occasioned a revolution in the representation of weather. For centuries, the sky in paintings was heavenly (azure, angel-stuffed) or else was rendered unobtrusively, as a backdrop for the presumptively more important activities on the ground. That changed in the early nineteenth century, thanks largely to the British artist John Constable. Keenly interested in contemporary meteorology, Constable monitored the latest developments in the field, painted outside in all weather, and, on the backs of more than a hundred studies of the sky, recorded the precise climatic conditions under which he painted them. The resulting landscapes featured such realistic weather that one critic, the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, said that Constable’s work “makes me call for my great-coat and umbrella.”
Fuseli did not mean this as a compliment. Initially, Constable’s meteorological accuracy met with widespread resistance. The first person to purchase one of his landscapes, outside his own circle of acquaintances, had another artist paint over the sky with a more tepid version. Eventually, though, both the critics and the public came around. Together with his colleague J. M. W. Turner (whose realistic skies Ruskin vigorously defended in “Modern Painters”), Constable paved the way for Delacroix, then Whistler, then Winslow Homer, until, in the visual arts, weather as iconography gave way to weather as weather: a natural phenomenon whose force and majesty were immense and sufficient in their own right.
A commensurate shift notably failed to take place in literature. Meteorology had constructed a new story about weather, down to the vocabulary used to tell it, yet writers seemed unable or unwilling to make use of it, even as their traditional strategies were becoming less viable. With the rise of a scientific understanding of weather, both its mythological and metaphorical clout diminished. Storms seem less like the verdict of God when you can track them by satellite two weeks out, and lightning loses some of its gothic thrill when you know that it is merely electrostatic discharge. A forecast, meanwhile, is a kind of anti-pathetic fallacy: it insists that the weather is the product of natural forces, utterly unrelated to the goings on in our culture, our relationships, and our soul.

While meteorology was advancing, then, the role of weather in literature began to decline. At the same time, the role of weather in real life was declining as well. As Western nations shifted from largely rural to largely urban economies, fewer people worked the kind of jobs that kept them exposed to the elements. As more automobiles hit the road, and more of those roads were paved, it became less of an ordeal to get from A to B in mud and sleet and snow. And, as indoor heating and cooling systems became common, more people were insulated from the vagaries of the weather.
In response to these changes, fiction, too, became climate-controlled: in the modern novel, as in modern housing, outside conditions seldom intruded. It is easy enough to find a rainstorm or a humid afternoon in twentieth-century prose, of course. But, with some notable exceptions (John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Willa Cather’s prairie trilogy), weather dwindled as a pervasive and determinative force in fiction. It mattered in the burgeoning field of nature writing, but it lingered elsewhere mainly in poetry (though much less so than in earlier eras) and in children’s books, with their tendency toward anachronism and nostalgia. Already robbed of most of its mythological weight, weather gradually lost the rest of its literary status, too. Only in the past few decades, as the facts about weather have become more and more pressing, is the subject beginning to reassert itself in fiction.

A hundred and sixty years after Dickens filled his skies with soot, a hundred and seventy-five years after Ruskin yearned for omnipotence over the globe, four hundred years after Shakespeare made a reckless ruler pull down his kingdom on his head, a hundred and twenty excess parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere: that is where we stand today. Unlike in Mark Twain’s time, there is nothing remotely banal about the weather. If anything, we are in mourning for that banality. What used to be idle chitchat about the unusually warm day or last weekend’s storm has become both premonitory and polarizing. Nor is there any innate melodrama left in meteorology. Weather is, instead, at the heart of the great drama of our time. Accordingly, the comedy has leached from Twain’s line. “No weather will be found in this book” now reads either as denialist—a refusal to face climatic reality—or, very simply, as sad.
But we do not need that line anymore. After a long wait, quite a lot of weather can suddenly be found in our books again. We owe that revival to the same thing that first led to the decline of weather in literature: developments in the field of meteorology. It is not just that the facts about climate change have become clear; it is that, in establishing those facts, the scientific model of weather, which eclipsed the symbolic one in the nineteenth century, is now colliding with it. These days, the atmosphere really does reflect human activity, and, as in our most ancient stories, our own behavior really is bringing disastrous weather down on our heads. Meteorological activity, so long yoked to morality, finally has genuine ethical stakes.

That shift began to be reflected in literature in the later decades of the twentieth century, with the emergence of the genre now known as cli-fi—short for climate fiction, and formed by analogy to “sci-fi.” As that suggests, novels about the weather have tended to congregate in genre fiction. The dystopian novelist J. G. Ballard wrote about climate change before the climate was known to be changing; later, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and many others used the conventions of science fiction to create worlds in which the climate is in crisis. More recently, though, books about weather are displaying a distinct migratory pattern—farther from genre fiction and closer to realism; backward in time from the future and ever closer to the present. See, among others, Ian McEwan’s “Solar,” Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior,” Nathaniel Rich’s “Odds Against Tomorrow,” Karen Walker’s “The Age of Miracles,” Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” and Dave Eggers’s “Zeitoun.” (Weather is on the rise in nonfiction, too. In addition to “Weatherland” and “The Weather Experiment,” recent or forthcoming titles include Tim Flannery’s “Atmosphere of Hope,” Christine Corton’s “London Fog,” Lauren Redniss’s “Thunder & Lightning,” and Cynthia Barnett’s “Rain.”)

The emergent canon of weather-related ''cli-fi'' got two excellent additions this year with Paolo Bacigalupi's THE WATER KNIFE, followed by Claire Vaye Watkins’s  “Gold Fame Citrus” . Both novels are must reads.

''GOLD'' is set in the future, at a time when extended drought and rapid desertification have turned much of the American West into one “mega-dune,” known as the Amargosa, after the first mountain range it consumed. Watkins’s title refers to the fantasies that once made people head west; now almost everyone in the region is desperate to move away. Most seek refuge in other states, where they are pejoratively referred to as Mojavs—Okies in reverse, discriminated against and, increasingly, turned away at the borders. Some stay in the desiccated and dangerous remnants of Los Angeles. A few go in search of a community that, rumor has it, has sprung up somewhere in the vast expanse of the Amargosa.
Those include the book’s main characters: a soldier turned drug dealer turned surfer and his girlfriend, a third-tier model who was once the literal poster child for water conservation, back when there was still water to conserve. A sweet, damaged, secret-keeping couple, they squat in the remains of a starlet’s mansion, until a neglected and developmentally delayed toddler happens into their life. They rescue her, or kidnap her, then head off to the desert—hoping, like so many parents before them, to make a better life for their child. It is there in the Amargosa that the book comes into its own, as a story about the desert, and about deserters—about those who abdicate responsibility and, conversely, those who lay claim to things to which they have no right, from the child of strangers to the resources of a nation.

In the months before “Gold Fame Citrus” was published, reservoirs built to funnel water from the Colorado River to the Southern California desert had sunk to below half their capacity. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas dropped to five per cent of the historical average. The air rippled with record-setting heat above the parched ground, an illusion of water where water used to be. And the U.S. Senate, in a move that Robert FitzRoy would have recognized, voted to reject the scientific consensus that humans are changing the climate.
You could describe “Gold Fame Citrus” as science fiction, but only in the sense that it is fiction borne out by contemporary science. You could also describe it as dystopic, but that would miss the point. As Watkins deftly makes clear while almost never panning away from the desert, the plight of the Mojavs is specific to the region, and functionally ignored by the rest of the world. Ask a Syrian, ask a single mother of six in São Paulo’s slums, ask those who are bothering to keep track of the effects of climate change: like the future, dystopia is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.
Our earliest stories about the weather concerned beginnings and endings. What emerged from the cold and darkness of the void will return to it; waters that receded at the origin of the world will rise at its end. It is easy, in grim climatological times, to be drawn to the far pole of these visions. Weather has long been a handmaiden of the apocalypse, and the end of the world is so often presaged or effected by extreme climate shifts—floods, fires, freezing cold—that eschatology sometimes seems like a particularly dark branch of meteorology. Today, it is, if anything, even more difficult to imagine an end of the world that is not driven by a change in the weather. We speak of a “nuclear winter,” of the firestorms and the radical temperature drop that would follow an asteroid strike, of global climate change nudging planetary temperatures out of the range of the habitable.

But apocalyptic stories are ultimately escapist fantasies, even if no one escapes. End-times narratives offer the terrible resolution of ultimate destruction. Partial destruction, displacement, hunger, want, weakness, loss, need—these are more difficult stories. That is all the more reason we should be glad writers are beginning to tell them: to help us imagine not dying this way but living this way. To weather something is, after all, to survive. ♦
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