How Much Still Abides

In conversation at a LARB Luminary Dinner, Richard Powers and Rosanna Xia discuss cross-genre environmental writing, storytelling as music-making, and finding inspiration at the bottom of the ocean.

By Rosanna XiaDecember 9, 2024

• Fiction

• Environment

THIS OCTOBER, LARB hosted a Luminary Dinner featuring the highly decorated novelist Richard Powers in conversation with Rosanna Xia, an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Powers—the author of 14 novels, including The Overstory (2018), Bewilderment (2021), and Orfeo (2014)—is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. His latest novel, Playground (2024), was long-listed for the Booker Prize. Xia was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting; her first book-length work, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline (2023), recently won the 2024 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Their discussion was held as part of an intimate gathering at a private residence in Los Angeles and ranged from the—literal—depths of the ocean to cross-pollination between the fictional and nonfictional in environmental writing. The excerpt below has been edited for clarity and length. To support conversations like this and other public programming during our annual Fund Drive, you can learn more here.

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ROSANNA XIA: Why the ocean? What drew you to the ocean?

RICHARD POWERS: I guess it started 57 years ago. For my 10th birthday, my older sister gave me a book on coral reefs. This was in our house on the north side of Chicago. I remember looking out the window at row after row of square blocks, of brick bungalows—and then looking down at this book filled with psychedelic, surreal forms of life that seemed like they were from outer space—and thinking that the earth felt like two completely different worlds. I knew which one of those worlds I wanted to live in. I just thought I could never get there from where I was. By happy coincidence, the next year, my father (who was a school principal) took a job in Bangkok, Thailand. On my 11th birthday, I was swimming in the coral reefs of the South China Sea among all of these creatures that I knew from that book. From the age of 11 to 16 or 17, I was absolutely sure that I was going to become a marine biologist. (I ended up getting sidetracked.)

It was the death of my sister a couple years ago that reminded me of her gift, and of my childhood obsession, and got me reading again. I was reading, actually, one very specific anecdote about an oceanographic exploration that made me realize just how big the canvas was. I interpolate this into the book; I put this in a scene. Roughly a third of the book is devoted to a French Canadian diver who’s one of the very first people to use an Aqua-Lung. She’s 12 years old when her father throws her into a test pool with an early Aqua-Lung strapped to her back, and she discovers that she belongs underwater.

The creation of that character draws very heavily on the writings and the professional biography of Sylvia Earle, whom I acknowledge in the afterword of the book. But it’s a scene with this diver, when she’s a young woman in her twenties, in the year 1960, and she’s on her very first oceanographic expedition: she’s on the ship off the coast of Guam, and they learn, with the rest of the world, that two men, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, have gone down in the bathyscaphe Trieste to the bottom of the Challenger Deep—the deepest spot in the ocean, just seven miles down. It takes Piccard and Walsh five hours to get down there, in this little sphere that’s just big enough for two men to smash up against each other. It has a little plexiglass window, which cracks five miles down. They’re down there for 20 minutes, and then they make the long journey back up. But what’s astonishing to all the oceanographers and marine biologists on a lean ship in 1960, when they hear about this expedition, is that Piccard and Walsh find life all the way down this seven-mile water column. At the time, no oceanographer on earth even knew the average depth of the ocean—the sense of what the ocean looked like was completely missing.

Then they start to speculate. I allow them to speculate fairly close to the actual figure that becomes the consensus figure, which is about 4,000 meters (four kilometers). They start doing the math: if the ocean covers three-quarters of the surface of the earth, and life goes down all the way down, compare that to the envelope of life on land … I don’t know, what’s the average height of large animal life on land? Probably 200 feet. (I’m thinking of the tallest trees or skyscrapers, or something like that.) What’s the average envelope for large life? I’m being very generous; I think it’s probably more like 50 feet. If the oceans are four kilometers, two-and-a-quarter miles deep, then you do the math—three-quarters the surface times the depth—99 percent of the space on earth that’s inhabited by multicellular life is underwater.

So here I was: I had written Overstory, I had written Bewilderment. I was on this mission to try to find a way of making novels capable of bringing in the more-than-human world, of reuniting us to the living planet, and I hadn’t even started yet. There was this story so large—larger than could fit in any novel, for sure—but I felt the desire to try, to take this form that I was experimenting with in Overstory and extend it to the 99 percent of the available biosphere that we can’t live in.

There’s also the temporal axis, which is the realization that life has been playing, unfolding—experimenting—for over three billion years before large life ever came up on land. You take the spatial and the temporal axis, and the rest of our stories, forever, could be about this place.

I was actually at the Monterey Bay Aquarium over the weekend doing a talk, and it was the most magical place to finish your book. They work with an incredible research institute, and they have the most advanced technology with deep-sea robots and imaging; they’ve really helped us see so much of the deeper parts of the ocean. One of their senior deep-sea explorers told me that if an alien came down to earth and wanted to study the life forms of this planet, the dominant life forms of the planet, they wouldn’t be exploring land. They’d be exploring at the bottom of the ocean.

You just reminded me of that Arthur C. Clarke quote: “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.”

Yes! We’re a planet of water, not a planet of land. I’ll admit, after writing about this for so long, I sometimes find myself running out of ways to say this. So I was blown away by all your fresh and unexpected descriptions of the ocean. I read your book so slowly, savoring every word. And now I want to ask you a question that I get asked a lot: how did your relationship with the ocean change over the course of your research and writing?

So much of this book was a recreation of that childhood animism, that childhood pantheism, that I think so many of us feel when we’re young. We don’t need to be told to take the more-than-human world seriously; it’s the world of our attention. It’s something about becoming an adult that colonizes us and narrows our focus.

So much in this book was a re-creation and also a recreation. I wrote it in landlocked eastern Tennessee. For inspiration, I got in the rivers of southern Appalachia with my mask and snorkel. We have 80 species of freshwater fish in southern Appalachia. We’re a great source of constant renewal. There are 33,000 species of fish in the world, fresh and salt combined, which is more than mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds put together. The other fabulous thing that I discovered is that it may be that we have cataloged perhaps as few as 10 percent of the species of oceanic life. There are 4,000 new ones reported every year—which is a lot. But the idea that for each one that we know about, there are nine that we don’t …

What was the question again? The discovery of these astonishments, reading everything that Sylvia Earle wrote—no single person has done more to bring the ocean into our consciousness and the urgency of the ocean into our consciousness—talking directly to researchers, reading the primary sources, I would say that what I was conscious of, that was different from my childhood, the way that my understanding of the ocean changed was in moving from the visceral to the cognitive. Two simultaneous movements: One of incredible sadness at the diminishment of the oceans in my lifetime, and then the opposite motion, of incredible astonishment. How much bigger the place is than I ever imagined. I had that famous Tennyson line in my head: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides.” Though much is taken … I can’t even name how much still abides.

I really love that. In my own writing process, it wasn’t necessarily my relationship with the ocean that changed but my relationship with land—and recognizing that land itself is also like a tide that ebbs and flows. With sea level rise, we’re fighting so hard to keep an extra foot of beach here or there, whether or not to put our house here, whether or not to move the road a few feet back. But what does a few feet mean for an ocean as massive as the Pacific? I think resetting again, the calibration of land versus water, was truly what shifted for me.

I want to say how much kinship I felt with your book. I’ve been writing what is now a triptych of antihuman, exceptionalist fiction—trying to say that we have come, historically, to try to define ourselves as an autonomous entity. We’ve come to think about this entire world as something that we have dominion over, and that the more-than-human world is sort of ancillary to our project and a set of resources for us. Within that project, of asserting the human story as if it is the story of life on earth, I found so many ways that you came at this freshly. You talk about aligning the sand that we’ve tried to set, as if we know where the land starts and the ocean stops and vice versa, and how impossible that is, not just as a historical process. You have this refrain: the coast “is always being saved.” But releasing that human project to return us not only to a sense of the interdependence between all biomes and all creatures but to a kind of temporal interdependence as well, putting us back into this long time procession—what Loren Eiseley calls “the immense journey”—I felt that kinship as well.

One of the motifs in Playground comes from a book by James P. Carse called Finite and Infinite Games (1986), which is a philosophical reflection of understanding human culture. I think it grows out of Johan Huizinga’s famous Homo Ludens book from 1938 where Huizinga starts out by saying “Play is older than culture.” [He argues that] civilization grows up in play. In fact, play is older than the human species.

In researching this book, I found instance after instance after instance of playing fish, of playing invertebrates—creatures who are so far from us on the taxonomic tree, our last common ancestors, hundreds of millions of years ago, that play. The reason I raise it is because Carse has this line—“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of contuining the play.” In California Against the Sea, it’s quite clear that the revolutionary concept that we need is to go from thinking that we’re in a finite game against nature that we can win to thinking there is an infinite game that we have to return to and that we have to learn how to keep playing.

This ties back to your themes of reciprocity and kinship, and this idea of the give-and-take with nature. We so often extract, but we don’t give back. That’s present in this book and a lot of your other books.

I found Playground so beautiful and mesmerizing—there’s this profound way that you write about the ocean, where you really recognize the vastness of the ocean and how it truly is the last uncolonized, unconquerable place on this planet. This place itself is massive, and it’s not one singular place but, at the same time, is also singularly connecting so many different threads. Could you talk a little bit about how you think about individualism versus these greater systemic problems (which is something that gets discussed a lot in the climate change space, the individual versus the system)?

Narratively, we also tend to perpetuate in writing this idea of a single main character or a single hero, and you continue to humble us with how you write at such a complex and grander, more systemic kind of level, while helping us also still connect uniquely to our sense of place in this world, our sense of connection to the system. Walk us through this a little bit: how do you think through all these layers? You don’t have one main character—in a world where we tend to think about stories in that way, you truly balance the individual versus the system in such a mind-expanding way.

That’s another source of kinship that I felt with your book. As you go up and down the coast of the state, talking to these towns that are all facing this impending—not even impending, current—crisis, and exploring the ways in which they are also running referendums on their own futures, so much of it comes down to this culture that says, “I am willing to stake everything on a personal throw of the dice.” Yet we actually can come up with solutions, collectively, that could be of great use to all of us, and the ways in which this colonizing culture—where meaning is entirely private and arbitrary and created by individuals and usually mediated through commodities—has to give way to older forms of organizing collective life. Playground tries to engage those same questions.

How do you get them all in play inside a narrative most people aren’t reading to expand their philosophical understanding of the world? They want to know what happens, right? There’s a certain material challenge, just in plotting, to make a character compelling enough to identify with, to set things in motion at a pace that people are excited by. I know that I read strangely: I can weep over philosophy as easily as I can weep over the death of Little Nell, or anything that fiction does. But my 40-year career has been about learning how to take the more conventional pleasures of story, to use them as seduction for the things that are most compelling to me. I don’t know what literary critic said this—I’m remembering this for the first time in decades—but there was somebody who described Shakespeare by saying, “What’s amazing about Shakespeare is how much poetry his audience would abide on their way to blood and thunder.” That’s what I’m trying to learn how to do. How to get enough blood and thunder in there so that the poetry might seduce them all along the way as well.

It’s a bit of a three-ring circus, this book. How can you possibly connect worlds that are so diverse? Well, when your theme is interdependence and reciprocity, and the contingency of individual lives on these larger stages—the ways in which we are being written by these processes—it makes sense to try to get them all onstage. For me, the answer in this case was to learn what my unconscious already knew about their connectivity—and then just get out of my own way. There were a couple of false starts. Once I got a glimpse of the way in which these stories depended on each other, the thing basically wrote itself. It was the closest thing that I’ve ever had to a gift over the course of writing these 14 books.

Thank you, LARB, for bringing the fiction and the nonfiction world together. Because I also feel such kinship to your writing. I’m reminded too—another writer once said to me, “Writing nonfiction is like trying to compose music with all the sounds you collect on a busy, chaotic street, and writing fiction is like trying to compose music in a silent room.” I feel like, Richard, you’ve somehow done both: created an opus out of all the sounds in this world, plus all the sounds in your head.

I was geeking out with the managing editor, Emmerich Anklam, of my indie publisher Heyday Books, based in Berkeley. It’s really fun to talk to editors about books, and he was saying, “I love how Richard Powers tends to have a helical structure in his storytelling”—where you’d have, like, two or three (or nine, in The Overstory) strands going at the same time. And they’re not necessarily interacting with each other all the time, but they’re informing each other.

That’s terrific. This book is clearly in direct conversation with Overstory. In fact, it’s a kind of motivic recapitulation of a lot of the elements of Overstory, in a kind of recombinant way. I see these three books kind of as a musical form, as like a giant concerto, where this the first movement, this big allegro of The Overstory, is contrasted with a very different kind of story in Bewilderment, a kind of minor largo for the middle movement, and then the third movement, a sort of presto that brings back all the themes from the first movement. So, I do see them as talking to each other.

I think my love of writing structures that are contrapuntal came directly out of my lifelong love of contrapuntal music. It’s tough to do it when everything has to be sequential, right? The beauty of musical counterpoint is that it’s simultaneous, that there’s a vertical component, but there are ways of creating analogies to that, even when you’re compelled to follow strict linearity. I do know that there are also huge hazards involved in trying to do it as well. There was a contemporary of Bach who said: “This man would be the wonder of the universe if he could only decide which line was the melody.” Sometimes I think that accusation could be made very strongly against these books. What is the main story here? What’s the figure, and what’s the ground? But for me, the delight is that in a good contrapuntal novel, as in good contrapuntal music, figure and ground are constantly moving back and forth and redefining each other.

Your most recent three books, The Overstory, Bewilderment, and now Playground, are interesting because, as an environmental writer, I feel like in the environmental spaces, you’re now known as an environmental novelist—the environmental novelist—but I’ll admit, I didn’t necessarily consider you “a nature writer.” In your earlier books, I feel like you write a lot about capitalism and how capitalism affects the way we think and how we interact with the world—and that, to be sure, has turned out to be so prescient and connected to the environmental issues weighing on us today. I’m thinking back to one of your books from the late 1990s, Gain; since then, has anything changed about your core way of seeing the world and how we participate in these systems? How we might resist those forces, or how we might question them? Have you become more optimistic, pessimistic, radical?

Do any of you remember your fourth grade teacher, who taught you the three different kinds of drama? In the sexist language of my day, it was Man against Man, Man against Himself, and Man against the Elements. The point being, you could tell stories that were primarily about collisions in value inside an individual, someone who wanted to do justice to the things that were most important to them but who was put into a situation where they had to choose between values and—when pushed to the wall—decided that they could sacrifice this value to honor that value. That’s a powerful form of storytelling (and we’ve become incredibly good at that kind of storytelling). And then the second type, which is, “I am honoring my core inner value, and Rosanna is honoring her core inner value, both of which appear perfectly admirable and understandable to the reader, but both of which cannot coexist in the dramatic moment that we’re facing, when we’re put in conflict with each other.” The third form, which was so prevalent—I would say was the dominant kind of storytelling for most cultures of the world, in most places on earth—for most of human history, was “We humans want something. Can the world abide it? Will the world tolerate it?”

That form of storytelling disappeared from Western literature for a long time, probably starting in the late 19th century. By the time I was a young man, trying to understand how literary fiction worked, it was almost impossible to see that kind of conflict foregrounded in a book. I read book after book after book that treated nothing but human beings in conflict with themselves or each other. And it slowly dawned on me: it’s because we thought we won that drama, that there was no more conflict between what we wanted and what the world would allow. We were going to tell the world what it would allow. We were going to draw the line in the sand. We were going to say the land is here and the ocean is there—leave it to us.

When that drama came back in, it was always nostalgically. It was in a historical novel, Jack London or something like that—or some civilized person gets trapped in a horrible situation through accident and has to solve some crisis that would have been solved instantly had technologies been available, right? We thought that technology had resolved that whole field of fiction. It’s clear what’s happened. In the last several years, we writers have realized, along with everyone else on earth, that not only did we not win that war, but we also are being routed. We now need stories that remember that the earth is not our domesticated creature. We cannot “draw a line in the sand.”

Now this, this flood of ways of telling stories where other things, aside from us, are agents and get to have a say in what happens. There were genres that never left, that never gave that up—science fiction, fantasy—and take the more-than-human seriously throughout that whole period. It’s “literary” fiction that’s had to come back, right? (And isn’t it interesting that for a long time, literary fiction looked down on those other genres as if they were second-class?) It’s quite clear that what we need now are stories that, in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, teach us how “to become indigenous” again, which means to belong to this place … Stories where we’re coming back home to this world that we never really left. But we now have to see it again with new eyes.

I also was thinking about Robin Wall Kimmerer when I was reading your book. Especially in your earlier work, people like to call you cerebral—which I kind of chuckle at. It’s true, but there’s so much more than that. There’s a heart and a deep curiosity and empathy in your work that I also really want to index. My editor once told me that a book should attend to not just the intellectual journey of a reader but also the emotional journey. And I’m curious: how do you want people to feel as they’re reading Playground?

I was thinking as you were talking: the “emotional journey” is a wonderful redundancy because, etymologically, that word—emotion—has the word move in it. So, to feel something deeply is to go from this place to this place. It’s true, we can take purely intellectual journeys—you know, I’m actually going to retract that. I don’t think we can ever take a purely intellectual journey, because there’s always an affective component to understanding something, even if we try to isolate the cognitive processes. It may be that attempted isolation that’s been our downfall … I think it may be that great divorce that we tried to implement between science and the spirit that allowed us to run over this place. I think that our future here, our ability to stay in the infinite game a little bit longer, is going to depend on seeing the ways that those two systems are never separate from each other, are absolutely necessary in defining each other—and that they are, in fact, always running concurrently in each of us.

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Featured image of Luminary Dinner by Melina Psarros.