Weather
The roads have been quite lately, streets full of people instead of cars, the quiet hum of a collective effort to locate some semblance of normalcy, release or reassurance in the midst of a pandemic that has suddenly turned the shape of life as we know it inside out. The sense of uncertainty and even moral ambiguity we are experiencing in this historic time is also familiar to Lizzie, the narrator is Jenny Offill’s timely new book, Weather.
Lizzie, half-heartedly invested in her work as a librarian, is fully committed to nuanced observations of her relationships and the landscapes she inhabits. These observations, shared in fragments both light and unbearably heavy, compose the loose narrative of the book, and reflect to us the ethical, psychological and practical complexity of living on a planet that is very much not okay.
The current pandemic (and yet to be known fall out) has acutely amplified the unsustainability and injustice in our ecological, social and political systems. How we continue to make a life in such conditions, attending to both the global and the personal, is Lizzie’s central concern and perhaps her most resonate and urgent observation is that these two aspects of experience are not so separate.
Lizzie’s reflections oscillate in scale much the ways our minds do as we struggle to process the gravity of our own experiences now in real time. As a meditator in the book comments, “I have been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in the melted ego world. But I find I have trouble coming back to the differentiated world, the one you were just talking about where you have to wash the dishes and take out the garbage.”
While we so often experience the global world and the mundanity of our own small lives as separate, there is some fundamental delusion in this view. The Zen tradition offers a wealth of reflection on the interdependence of these views and Offill, herself a sometimes meditator, makes good use of this tradition in the book to explicate this idea. As Lizzie juxtaposes the big and small, the mundane and consequential, throughout the book, we are asked to confront the stark truth that our diligence or neglect in recycling household trash, for example, will not dissipate the school of plastic ducks and straws swimming in the ocean, but it is also not without consequence.
In this way, Weather cuts right to the heart of what it means to live a good and moral life. This is reflected in the podcast Lizzie answers questions for on behalf of her mentor, Sylvia, aptly named “The Center Cannot Hold.” Lizzie comments, “What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances.”
The viral crisis is a time of complex ethical and moral decision making and has a way of leveling any delusion that we are not connected, that I don’t affect you, that you can separate yourself from me, or that any of us can clearly stake a claim on what is good. While this struggle is more obvious when the crisis is acute, it has no less urgency and perhaps more when we live warmly ensconced in a self-constructed world that perpetually reinforces the idea that I am me and you are you and that the borders of these identities are neat and clear and can be fenced in. Crisis can take us to the edge of control and there is an invitation to awaken to the fiction of our creation. This can feel terrifying and liberating all at once. It also comes with a profound sense of dislocation. Where am I, how do I move through the world as it is.
Everyone in the Lizzie’s world feels displace in small and large ways. Her addiction addled brother learning to be father, her son just growing into a sense of himself in the world. Most of all Lizzie, who seems at times to exist more through her observations of others than through the dim and distant space she occupies in the library, in cabs, in her own apartment even, as an independent being. Lizzie captures this perpetual displacement best as she cycles through feelings of responsibility, exhaustion, fear and frustration, unable to land and act from any particular one.
As Lizzie reflects to a friend who is trying to sort out her dating life, “But no one is safe, I want to tell her. Safe?” On a surface level we might understand safety as something that reinforces a sense of agency, our ability to protect our bodies and psyches as they move through space. But there is a deeper question Lizzie evokes. How is both our intellectual concept and felt experience of safety challenged when we understand that what imperils you, what imperils the plant, is not without effect for me? This is to say, that we try and also must parse the world apart between subject and object, inner and outer, you and me, and would do good to recognize both the necessity and absurdity of this way.
If we understand Weather with all our senses, in all its permutations, Offill has crafted a story in which the weather is us. This is to say that it’s less a story about how we survive life on a fractured earth and more about the ways that this global fracturing is our own personal fracturing. The ways in which inside and outside meet in an endless circle of cause and effect.