Man in the Holocene 
by 

Max Frisch, 

 

Geoffrey Skelton (Translator)

 

Climate Change

Floods, avalanches, landslides, mass extinctions. What are we to make of these randomly destructive events? Do they exist if there is record, no memory of them? And what difference would it make to not know about them? Or to receive no news from the rest of the world at all? Catastrophe really can’t be prepared for can it? And news is almost always irrelevant.

But how about events closer to home? Like whether the Alpine valley in which one lives is in danger from continuous Summer storms? Are there any signs of new cracks in the cliffs or across the sudden fields? Alas, even then, what good would it do to know?

Surely though, one’s own state of being is of crucial import. As one gets older, minor infirmities can only be expected. But are things now progressing more rapidly? Wouldn’t it be prudent to be worried about them? Perhaps they should be noted down somewhere.

Yes, that’s it. But then it’s really essential to go far enough into the past in order to discern the pattern of development. Not just the history of this one life, but the cumulative experience of the species as well. And the geological formation of the valley itself is as relevant as anything else. 

Indeed the tens and hundreds of millions of years of planetary development in its distinct periods from the Cambrian to the Quaternary, these too have to be considered. And with those, the numerous bits of human knowledge - how to construct a geometric golden section, the constituents of the cells of the human body, the expansion of the universe, train timetables - are things that must be remembered if one is to diagnose the changes taking place in oneself.

So notes proliferate. They fill the house. Their purpose is to keep memory alive. But they are actually symptoms of its death. The only disaster that matters is the one we can’t see taking place. We survive it; but at a price. The Holocene epoch is that during which the world loses its memory in a flurry of notes, and note-like memories. “Erosion is a slow process.” But eventually it triumphs.