Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe
It's publication day. A few thoughts on sending this book into the world. And an excerpt.
For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal.
—Simone Weil, letter to Fr. Joseph-Marie Perrin
We’re working for something that brings us together beyond blasphemies and prayers. It's all that matters.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
Dear friends,
Those two brief quotations serve as the epigraphs at the front of my new book, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe, which is officially out today from Haymarket Books. I’ve tried to let the words of Weil and Camus guide me during the past few years as I finished the book. For the most part, I haven’t lived up to them. But in a few fleeting moments of grace, their meaning has become all the clearer: We are all we’ve got.
In the world of book publishing, “publication day” is supposed to be an event, a special day in life of an author. But for many (certainly me), it’s somewhat anticlimactic. Whatever small thrill or sense of satisfaction one may have felt upon seeing the final product of years’ worth of often painful effort, holding the object in one’s hands (a surreal experience), has long since passed. Now, on the Big Day, it’s just… well, frankly, waiting to be judged in public. Or, more likely, simply ignored (another kind of judgement). Not that I’m playing for your sympathy here—trust me, I don’t merit anyone’s sympathy—I’m just telling you how it is. And the truth is, a book like this one isn’t likely to get much, if any, mainstream mass-media attention at all—and if it does, it’s not very likely to be favorable. Because the things I have to say make people deeply uncomfortable, and this, so I’ve heard, is not the ideal marketing strategy.
Indeed, most “small,” “literary,” “serious” books sink like stones to the bottom of the warm, acidifying ocean. They depend almost entirely on word-of-mouth, personal networks, and yes, social media, to make them float. So… if you want to help this book “find its audience,” pass this email along, share the post on your “socials,” tell your friends and networks about it, anyone who may be seeking something more than comfort.
Rather than give you a marketing pitch, I’ve decided to give you the book’s opening pages. What follows is the preface, or “prelude” (as I pretentiously call it). It’s quite short, and it explains what the book is about, and why I wrote it…
PRELUDE
“Truly, I live in dark times!”
“Truly, I live in dark times!” So begins Bertolt Brecht’s anguished and indelible poem “To Those Born After” (or “To Posterity”), written in Denmark in the late 1930s while he was on the run, as a prominent German leftist, from Hitler’s Third Reich. “You who will emerge again from the flood / In which we have gone under,” Brecht addresses his imagined reader, “Remember / When you speak of our failings / The dark time too / Which you have escaped.”
At the time he wrote the poem, Brecht still advocated a utopian Marxist-Leninist future beyond class and national conflict, but not without misgivings. He was aware by then of Stalin’s terror and the Moscow show trials, and that his own artistic commitments put him at risk, and the poem is that rare thing in Brecht—a confessional, conscience-stricken, conflicted tale of failed revolutionary ends and means, of humanity betrayed in the effort to save it. And so in a final appeal, holding to some desperate faith, he writes, “When the time comes at last / And man is a helper to man / Think on us / With forbearance.”
I am far removed from the time and place, and the historical struggle, in which that poem was written, but it haunts me in ways I find hard to articulate.
Brecht was among the men and women profiled by Hannah Arendt in her 1968 volume of essays, Men in DarkTimes, and despite the bleakness, even despair, of Brecht’s famous poem, Arendt found something in it worth holding on to, something affirming, something worth examining—a warning, a self-knowledge—in her effort to understand the source and meaning of the poet’s witness. “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination,” Arendt explained in her introduction, “and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weaklight that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth—this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn.”
I make no attempt to imitate Hannah Arendt in what follows, but I do offer the essays here in much the same spirit conjured in those introductory lines. We, too, live in dark times—even, perhaps, among the darkest. And we need, crave, seek, some kind of illumination.
~
Written over a period of eight years, beginning in 2016, and intended to be read as a series, these essays concern themselves with a not-so-distant past, an embattled present, and a future that, while impossible to know in its particulars, is nevertheless increasingly circumscribed by catastrophic ecological breakdown and social instability. The geophysical forces unleashed by the carbon-fueled warming of Earth’s atmosphere—combined with the political forces of denialist capital and various racial and ethno-religious nationalisms—already create a situation in which forms of political and social evil, on a scale not seen since the middle of the twentieth century, have come into view. The necessity of naming these evils is among the convictions animating this book. How to live into this time, while holding on to those aspects of our humanity that can salvage and sustain any sort of just community, is the book’s central question.
In what follows, I look back to Arendt and other twentieth-century Europeans (Václav Havel, Simone Weil, Albert Camus), and one who rebelled against European colonialism (Frantz Fanon), and back to the nineteenth century in America (Thoreau) and Russia (Dostoevsky), while also considering some of our contemporaries writing about and engaging in the struggles of our own moment. If these writers and thinkers share any one thing in common—aside from fierce intelligence and a willingness, even a need, to face the most harrowing facts of their times—it’s the aspiration toward something like a universal humanism, whether secular or religious, and ultimately transcending both. All are in search of what I’d call, without embarrassment, human solidarity and its sources.
But if it’s comfort or some kind of cost-free hope you’re looking for, be warned that these essays make no such promises. What they do, when read together as a whole, is peer straight into the abyss of our converging political and planetary catastrophes, coming at it from varying angles, historical and literary, collective and individual, political and moral and spiritual, at times deeply personal, seeking insight from others who learned—or tried—to live in the dark. (It may be that the best we can ever do is try—and keep trying.) They trace a personal and political arc from my first attempt to fully face the abyss, with the help of Arendt, in the first year of the Trump era; through a renewed political engagement with the climate-justice movement and my ongoing commitment to escalated nonviolent direct action; through a personal and spiritual reckoning in the depths of the pandemic and the violent aftermath of the 2020 US election; and on up to the reckoning of a genocidal war in Palestine and the dark, chaotic uncertainty of 2024.
This book was written before the outcome of the US election could be known, but make no mistake: even the best imaginable result would not have “saved” us—there is no American center-left solution to our global climate and political emergency—and a second Trump presidency only points to what we already knew, that the United States faces the very real threat of white-nationalist “Christian” fascism. The latter has been clear, to those with ears to hear and eyes to see, for the past eight years, if not the past century, and it is among the underlying currents running through these essays. And so this book, given these combined realities, keeps returning to a question that now seems to resonate with all the more urgency, especially on the left: If nothing short of revolution, in some form, can salvage the possibility of a better world—ecologically and socially—and yet if a viable revolutionary mass movement is nowhere to be found, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the face of catastrophes that will not, do not, wait?
Will those born after, if they emerge from the flood, ask why we did not fight more forcefully?
~
Several of these essays are quite personal, and I should perhaps say something about where I’m coming from, my own experience, my own stake. This book is written not merely by a journalist or essayist or activist, or by a white, straight, cisgender man, born and raised in Southern California with a working-class, rural Texas, evangelical Christian family background. I am all of these, and I fully acknowledge the privileged yet complex position from which I write—not least in that, like most readers of this book, I am also an educated, housed, well-fed Global Northerner and beneficiary of empire.
But such terms and labels say nothing about the inner life of the one writing, about the psychological, emotional, spiritual, even physical toll of wrestling for many years with the questions raised here and with the responsibilities and choices required of one who takes them seriously. Maybe I’m not supposed to admit this, especially as a person of privilege (What are my struggles compared to those of the earth’s oppressed?), but in early 2016, after the publication of my book on the US climate movement—and as the world watched the rise of Donald Trump and the surge of white “Christian” nationalism—I fell into a vertiginous depression, not for the first or last time, intensified by my long struggle with anxiety and addiction (I’ve been sober for nearly two decades, but addiction, like anxiety, is never cured). I didn’t know if I would write or engage in activism ever again, and I confess—this is not easy—that I questioned my reasons and my desire to live. It was in those darkest moments that I picked up Arendt and Camus, Weil and Dostoevsky, Havel and Fanon, and many others not in this book—Bonhoeffer, Wiesel, Levi, Miłosz, Solzhenitsyn, and more—who faced the abyss in their time. And I began to read them, or reread them, in earnest. That’s how this book was born, as though I was trying to read and write my way out of real despair. I won’t bullshit you—I don’t know if I’ve succeeded. But I’ve chosen to live, and to fight, and to go down fighting.
If these essays, as my own sort of confession, my appeal to posterity, reveal a constant internal struggle between despair in the face of our predicament and something like, not any cheap hope, but what might be called resolve—and if the struggle has no satisfying end, so that despair and resolve live side by side, unreconciled—then the book I’ve written is an honest one.
Where precisely the resolve comes from, how to find it, how to hold on to it—and why—may be unknowable. All that matters is that the resolve is real—every bit as real as the dark itself.
[excerpted from Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe. Haymarket Books, ©2025 by Wen Stephenson]
Friends, it’s an extraordinary privilege to be a writer for national media and an author of books. That’s something I try to remind myself of every day. Thank you, truly, for spending your time with these words.
-Wen
P.S.
Here’s what my dear friend and comrade Anthony Rogers-Wright says about the book in The Progressive. He knows me all too well.
And on a very different note, and not about my book yet somehow closely related, I want to share this remarkable, life- and humanity-affirming essay by another dear friend and comrade, Jane Hirshfield, called “Poems in a Time of Crisis, Part Two: Tenderness.” We can all use a little more of it.