Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes.
Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly everything feels awful. I have a bad case of weltschmerz, a term I just learned that smashes together the German words for ‘world’ and ‘pain.’ According to Joachim Whaley, a German historian and linguist at the University of Cambridge, weltschmerz “is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally.” He adds, “it is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”
Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. My personal failings represent the failings of humanity. And lordy are we failing hard.
I’ve tried to pinpoint the source of my current weltschmerz, but it seems to be nothing and everything all at the same time. I can’t stop thinking about Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead calf for a thousand miles over the course of 17 days. How long before Tahlequah’s entire clan is gone? No calves have survived since 2015, and the population has dropped to just 75 whales, a thirty-year low. Scientists attribute the decline to boat noise, pollution, and dwindling supplies of salmon. In other words, we are to blame.
The possible extinction of these orcas makes me think about the all-too-imminent extinction of the vaquita. (That’s on us too.) And that makes me think about the beachgoers in Argentina who plucked an endangered baby dolphin from the water, passed it around for selfies, and then left it to die stranded on the mud. (A year later it happened again.) Welcome to the most depressing mental rabbit hole ever.
Meanwhile, the west is burning. Smoke from the massive California wildfires has spread across the country. I just returned from a weeklong trip to Montana. The day I arrived, smoke hung thick in the Gallatin Valley, obscuring the usually majestic Bridger Range. And while I was there, Montana itself began to burn. Just days after I passed through the dusty town of Ennis, lightning ignited two fires that have now charred more than 4,000 acres each. (The Mendocino fire in California has burned more than 300,000 acres.) We’re largely to blame for all these wildfires too. Lightning may have started the blazes near Ennis, but a warmer, drier climate provided the tinder.
Human assaults on the natural world used to make me rage. As a teenager, I remember shedding hot, angry tears over the clubbing of baby seals. Fuck humans, I used to think. The planet would be better off without us.
That’s still true, of course. But now that I have a three-year-old, the mass extinction of humanity is not something I care to contemplate.
Smith also has children. “The world is at least/ fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/ estimate, though I keep this from my children,” she writes in Good Bones. The poem grapples with the question of how to talk to kids about the world without scaring the bejeezus out of them. It ends with these lines: “I am trying/ to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,/ walking you through a real shithole, chirps on/ about good bones: This place could be beautiful,/ right? You could make this place beautiful.”
Selling the world isn’t easy these days. On August 11, Tahlequah the orca let her dead calf go. She moved on. That’s one possibility at least. It’s also possible the calf’s body simply came apart. One more thing to keep from our children.
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