Unveiling Truths Amid Chaos: Ed Simon’s Radical Take on Writing in the Apocalypse
I’ll focus on the Anthropocene section as that’s where my expertise lies.
Simon divides Anthropocene writing into four subsections: writing for memory, writing for protest, writing for meaning, and writing for preservation. Though he uses them as standalone topics, there is some overlap between them.
One of the key components of writing for memory is shifting baselines theory. Simon doesn’t mention it here, but it refers to the fact that future generations get used to the changed environment and can’t believe that it was once different. For example, having heatwaves in May in Europe will become commonplace instead of a rarity. Having warm winters where it rains instead of snows will become normal. This dovetails into writing for preservation: to have a record of these events so we don’t forget that they are abnormal, that we remember what we used to have and the weather used to be. When we see the sea water lapping at the robes of the Statue of Liberty, we need to remember that it was not always thus. We need to save our writing from the midst of the apocalypse to pass on to future generations (writing for preservation).
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