Another Chance at This Dilapidated Earth

Lauren Markham considers personal and planetary grief, longing, and estrangement in her review of Laura Marris’s “The Age of Loneliness.”

By Lauren MarkhamOctober 25, 2024

• Environment

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

IT CAN BE DEBILITATING to look at—to truly and ponderously consider—the world through an ecological lens. As I write this, I’m holed up in an apartment in Tennessee. It’s pouring, and my feed is swamped with images of submersion: Hurricane Helene has drowned people, cars, homes, entire forests, entire towns. A family hides out on their roof, safe above the roil of the flood—that is, for now, until that roof collapses beneath them and, with the rush of water, they are gone.

The losses aren’t yet fully cataloged. Still, I feel their magnitude growing, contributing to a more generalized grief for people I don’t know and faraway places I’ve never been. The feeling sits, abstract yet heavy in my gut. Often, I’m not sure what to do with it. After years covering the environment, most things I write have come to feel inadequate, feeble. It’s a journalist’s job to chronicle the world and expose its inner workings. But how can a journalist do this when the whole world, to say nothing of its inner workings, is so rapidly changing?

This enfeebling of language may have something to do with priorities. In her beautiful new essay collection, The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris explains how, “in 2015, the Oxford Junior Dictionary came under fire for dropping a list of words from the living world and increasing the number of words from technology and business.” These decisions endure in ink and print: words such as “lark,” “leopard,” “acorn,” and “kingfisher” have been struck from the dictionary’s pages.

This thinning of ecology from our vocabulary is analogous to the vanishings of the material world we’ve witnessed during the Anthropocene, or the climate crisis, or whatever one might call our current era of extreme weather, toxic contamination, and rapid species decline. After over a decade of debate, a group of climate scientists recently voted to nix the term “Anthropocene” as an official designation of geologic time anyway. Instead, they say, we’re still in the Holocene, which began some 11,700 years ago. (“To several members of the scientific committee,” wrote The New York Times, the proposed definition of the Anthropocene as having started in the mid-20th century, “was too limited, too awkwardly recent, to be a fitting signpost of Homo sapiens’s reshaping of planet Earth.”) How, then, might us nonscientists refer to this age? Perhaps we could call this the Eremocene, “the Age of Loneliness,” a term offered by the biologist E. O. Wilson—and the term from which Marris draws both inspiration and the title for her book. “If studies show that just being around other creatures and their habitats increases feelings of well-being in people, reduces stress, and relieves loneliness,” she writes, “what happens when the ease of that proximity is diminished, or altered, or made merely transactional?”

Marris’s nine tightly woven essays defy the inadequacies of language to describe the wounded natural world. In fact, defying these inadequacies seems central to her project: one she pulls off with rigor, earnestness, and grace. In tracing our estrangements from and entanglements with our proximal ecologies, the book maps both environmental sorrow among us human beings and its gleaming antidote: connection. Marris guides us through the places where she has lived, worked, and forged belonging; each essay offers a fascinating, forensic plunge into a disfigured landscape, its causes, and its reckonings. How, she asks, are we to relate to the places that spiritually and materially house us?

In one essay, she excavates her memories of Lost Lake, a place in Connecticut she went with her late father, alongside memories of her father himself, while also investigating how memory and landscape are intertwined. In another, Marris travels to the basement of the Smithsonian, to a place called the Feather Identification Lab, which catalogs the remains of birds struck by airplanes—a strange, mind-boggling, and largely unknown establishment. Given its vitality to air travel safety, we understand why this place exists—yet her essay probes more deeply, considering its meaning within a greater ecological order. “More than anything, the Feather Identification Lab is a sign of what it really takes to wedge an airport into a living ecosystem,” she concludes. In yet another essay she considers Mcity, the eerie suburban simulacrum erected near her then-boyfriend’s art studio in Ann Arbor to test self-driving cars. “Few places feel so ruined,” she writes, “when they’re still brand-new.” Other essays take us to the mudflats off the coast of Connecticut where she was raised, to the once-putrid waterways of Boston’s Back Bay, to the Superfund ruins of Buffalo, New York.

Memory is a central theme of this book, as is the unseen. “He says there are ways for water to move underground, too,” writes the author of her late father, “that we see only some of its movements. But if you dig down you can find it, like with a deep enough hole at the beach.” Marris is preoccupied by absences too: landmarks left off the maps, species that have disappeared or are soon to vanish. “At a moment when the living world is rapidly changing,” she writes, “I’m drawn to landscapes as flash points between what people perceive about a place and what gets edited out.” “What,” she wonders aloud on the page, “am I not seeing?”

The Age of Loneliness is also concerned with grief. Marris’s father died of cancer when she was in college. It was he—a hiker, a birder, a man deeply attuned to the natural world—who first helped Marris delight in the landscape around her and recognize its myriad entanglements. After he died, she writes, “I was left to understand how to relate to the landscape where I had survived him.”

But, of course, the central emotional preoccupation of this book is that of loneliness. “In college, after my father died,” writes Marris, “I’d learned that it’s dangerous to be lonely, to reveal, beneath the still service, a deepening eddy of need.” Around her, other college kids couldn’t relate to the causes of her loneliness. The death of her father, most acutely. But also, on a more constitutional level, Marris’s awareness of and abiding interest in ecological loneliness. “To begin to notice ecological diminishment, even anecdotally, I had to pay attention to loneliness,” she writes. This necessary attention, the act of noticing, forms the ideological launchpad of the book.

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Each essay is rooted in a particular place. Even so, Marris threads two key narratives throughout the collection: first, her memories and grief over her father, and second, her struggles, upon falling in love, to navigate a long-distance relationship and find a home where she and her beloved, both professors, could each be gainfully employed.

Marris deftly weaves her memories of her father throughout the essays. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might veer into the territory of nostalgia or sentimentalism, but Marris brings us her father as a full-blooded being, rendering him relevant on each page. It’s as if he is guiding us alongside her—hiking us out to Lost Lake or angling our gazes up to the sky to notice a certain rare bird. “I wonder if, in teaching me about birds,” she writes, “my father was actually teaching me how to unlearn loneliness. Telling me that though it may be impossible to step entirely outside human ways of understanding our surroundings, I should still value the longing to try.”

The collection’s first through line is driven by her father’s untimely death and the memory of his life and lessons. The second—that of navigating a long-distance relationship while yearning, simultaneously, for a rooted home—is punctuated by an overabundance of airplane travel. Early on in the book, Marris meets a man at an artist residency (a man who makes far-out art, such as a simulation in which a “micro-animal” called a tardigrade is placed in a biosphere for one—“an image of ecological loneliness,” she writes.) The two artists fall in love and must travel long distances to see one another, eventually endeavoring to—that grueling prospect—secure teaching jobs in the same place. Marris thus finds herself living a life in which she is constantly flying to see him or, after moving in with him, to fulfill the duties of her job hundreds of miles away. In all these airports and on all these planes, our narrator pines: for her beloved, for the earth below, for a sense of rootedness, for a life that doesn’t require so much flight. One night, watching the rain pound outside on the terminal window, she realizes the glass is so thick that the drops don’t even make a sound. “[A]s people,” she writes, “the airport promised us connection, but as passengers we were isolated, cut off from every ecological reality of where we were and where we were going.” These flights are both a function and cause of estrangement from place, further compounding her already potent loneliness.

Over the course of the book, this second through line, though rendered in the collection’s characteristically exquisite prose, begins to ring more hollowly than the first. One understands the impulse to run personal narrative through this reaching, searching collection—to sustain some current of traceable tension through to the end—yet her ideas and far-flung reportage are far more propulsive than the forlorn, eventually somewhat repetitive scenes of air travel. But it’s more than that. Missing a long-distance boyfriend feels proportionally small next to the greater planetary sources of loneliness she catalogs, such as never hearing a certain kind of bird anymore, or no longer having to clean splattered bugs off the windshield after a road trip because insect species are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. I find myself both empathizing with her circumstances (love is real, the adjunct hustle is a bitch) and insisting that that her personal crisis is not so apocalyptic and is in fact one of great privilege (she can afford incessant plane travel, for starters, and there are other jobs a person with her background and resources could find outside the academy). Ultimately, the abundance of air travel feels too thin a corollary for the questions they accompany.

To read Marris is to find oneself not only in the hands of a lonely soul, but also in those of a dogged detective, an astute historian, and a keen forensic anthropologist. Marris brings her capacious mind and its longings to the page; reading this book answers questions—often highly pragmatic in nature—that one never knew they had. Where do they test self-driving cars? What is the term for when the human backup driver takes over? What happens to the unidentified carcasses of birds hit by planes? What is the connection between human vaccines and horseshoe crab blood? What the hell is a tardigrade? Do they simulate bird crashes while testing planes? (Yes, with a machine known as the rooster booster. You’re welcome.)

Marris is also a lyricist of the highest order. Take her vivid description of the horseshoe crab: “Eventually their backs are so crowded with other creatures that they become sluggish with the drag.” Or just one example of the exquisite place-writing found on nearly every page: “The road to the house where my father died runs through a marsh, along a causeway between inlets ringed with spartina and phragmites. During early-morning tides, the light comes slatted through the reeds and gilds the scum on the water into an oily, golden brew.” Marris’s words are precise and alive, the products of someone awakened to landscape and taking full charge of her role as our guide, without ever veering into the overcooked or heavy-handed. This I find particularly remarkable: the way she uses language to make planetary loss—ecology itself—not only felt, articulable, but also new.

The author manages to incarnate the past with remarkable immediacy as well. On the overfishing of horseshoe crabs to near oblivion in the late 1800s for their use in fertilizer, she writes: “This ancient species of arthropod was piled along boardwalks like a fieldstone wall, but with a sinister glossiness, a hint of the living creatures decaying within their nitrogen-rich shells. Horse-drawn wagonloads of crabs waited outside the factories to be ground down, a bounty taller than a man.”

Marris is a deft meaning-maker too, pressing into her own questions at just the right moments and with just the right amount of grease. Horseshoe crabs have become central to vaccine testing, it turns out—including COVID-19 vaccines. “A cancer means a crab, until it suddenly doesn’t,” she observes. “When, exactly, does an animal become a backdrop for human concerns?”

Toward the end of the book, Marris quotes Barry Lopez: “It is not possible […] for human beings to outgrow loneliness.” To her, and perhaps also to Lopez, loneliness is above all a matter of feeling estranged from place. The rest of that paragraph explores her desire to know the names of the birds flying through the sky, and to better know her father.

Is this loneliness? Perhaps of a kind. But, as Marris suggests, the feeling might also be named as longing. “I decided that if I could not outrun or outgrow longing, then the least I could do was notice it,” she writes, deciding to go to the British county of Cornwall, where her father was raised, to feel better connected to that place and thus to him. As for the second through line, Marris and her partner ultimately find jobs in the same place: Buffalo. There, amid the open wounds of toxic pollution and Superfund cleanup, she begins to build a home: “[E]ven in scarred landscapes, a home can answer our longing—for closeness or company or regeneration. For muskrats and junk trees. For another chance at this dilapidated earth.”

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For all her brilliant meaning-making and interest in entanglements, Marris doesn’t thoroughly parse the distinctions between longing, grief, estrangement, and loneliness. She certainly understands each as different. Take this lovely line: “Unlike grief, which is acute and often a response to finality, loneliness hums in the background, but if you tune in to its frequency, it can reveal something about the ways people have often become isolated from the living world.” Here, Marris is naming a quality of loneliness—this incessant hum—but what is it, then, in its essence, as felt in the body and as distinct from grief? And from longing? And estrangement? What is the difference between missing her beloved while she’s on a plane versus grieving her father, versus reckoning with a destroyed home, versus longing for a landscape she no longer lives in, versus mourning a vanishing species or place? It’s not that I can’t recognize these feelings as cousins, but I wanted this great mind to walk me through the specific patterns of their relationality, their individual histories, like she does so beautifully with the horseshoe crabs and the birds.

The Age of Loneliness urges us to seek out the histories and ecologies of the places we are connected to. Marris has done this. She considers, for instance, new developments in her understanding of places she has known her whole life, such as the shoreline of her childhood home as a setting for the mass extraction of horseshoe crabs. “Let fall a drop of fact in memory,” she writes, “and the truth will unsettle your mind.”

Let us be so unsettled, Marris seems to urge us, while also taking root. After all, these aren’t mutually exclusive conditions. They’re mutually intertwined: “I wanted to believe that a place is not something dwelled in but something created together—through the hard fact of entanglement with other beings, by the life’s work of kinship and hospitable proximity.”