By Sandor Slomovits
I had every intention of writing here primarily about climate change. Despite the many crises that Americans and people throughout the world are confronting, it seemed clear to me that climate change dwarfed them all. It is, ultimately, perhaps the only genuinely global existential crisis, impacting every living being on the planet. Nevertheless, I felt I could not ignore the other emergencies, catastrophes, and calamities that we are also facing, because many of them either directly affect climate change, are affected by it, impair our efforts to mitigate it, or all of the above.
I began writing this essay on July 11. As you read it now, it’s a couple of months later. Do you recall the three weeks and some of the crises-du-jour preceding that date? Permit me, dear reader, to refresh your memory.
There were the Supreme Court’s rulings on gun rights, abortion, and limiting the EPA’s power to reduce power plant emissions. Additionally, some of the Justices made thinly veiled threats of perhaps even more draconian decisions to come.
Then there was the July 4th Highland Park shootings, triggering excruciating memories of the Uvalde and Buffalo massacres, and all the others before them.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol was exhuming and examining the sordid and by now almost buried details of that traumatic day.
The war in Ukraine was still raging, the threat of it exploding into a worldwide conflagration still looming, and its damaging effects on energy shortages and hunger in many parts of the world still unresolved.
The pandemic, depending on which expert’s crystal ball was Windexed the clearest, had either eased, entered an endemic stage or, with the recent advent of the most contagious variants yet, about to flare into its maximally dangerous phase to date.
High inflation in the US and throughout the world was further squeezing many people already in the grip of poverty.
What a dismaying, disheartening list. And a tragically abbreviated one at that. Oh yes, and don’t forget climate change.
After I finished writing the first draft of the previous paragraphs, I felt thoroughly enervated. I looked at that list and thought, “No one will want to read this. And especially, no one will want to read that climate change may be even more daunting than all of these issues, and that all of these are likely to make addressing climate change even more difficult.”
And then, unexpectedly, I heard a little voice singing a brief blues lyric in the back of my head. “A thimbleful of good news, a bucketful of bad.” Thinking that a line that good likely did not originate with me, I immediately Googled it. And found to my happy surprise, that in fact it had. The closest one that I found to it was by Henri Matisse who supposedly said, “A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.” Which is, I’m sure, good advice for painters but seemed, at first, not at all what my inner lyricist was singin’ about.
So, I asked my interior songsmith-in-residence for an encore and he doubled down with this. “A bucketful of bad news, a barrelful of worse.”
“That’s more like it,” I thought sourly. The original line had seemed, in my mood of the moment, Pollyannic, too good to be true. I couldn’t see, “A thimbleful of good,” on that list—or on any other I could conjure. I only saw buckets and barrels.
And then, as if on que, a notification popped up on my laptop screen. "Breaking News from the Washington Post.” Glad for the distraction, I opened the email. And immediately felt—literally, physically felt—different. My mood, my state, suddenly reoriented 180 degrees. All because I found myself looking at the first picture the James Webb Space Telescope had sent back from its parking spot a million miles from Earth.
It was breathtaking! A Jackson Pollack style spattering of innumerable galaxies on a black field—an absolutely jam packed view of an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the universe, a magnificent postcard from the edge of time. I was gobsmacked. I stared at the screen through wet eyes. It literally took me out of this world. As Dante wrote at the end of The Inferno, “We beheld through a round aperture/Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;/Thence we came forth to behold the stars again.”
None of the items on the crises list I’d just compiled had changed. None of the issues were clarified, mended, or resolved by the sight of that picture. Nothing in the world had changed.
But I had.
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I got up from my desk and headed outside for a walk. My neighbor was gathering daisies from her garden to bring into her house. The daisies looked especially lovely in the sunset’s fading light. I remarked on them and she said, “Yeah, I need something cheerful to bring inside.” I nodded, “I know what you mean.” And told her about the Webb photo I’d just seen, how beautiful it was, how it had uplifted me. She said she’d look for it as soon as she went inside.
A single picture, a handful of daisies. Maybe Matisse’s maxim, “A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful” applied in this respect also. Maybe a thimbleful of good can be more powerful than a bucketful, or even a barrelful of bad. Maybe Webb’s shining example of international cooperation, of technological miracle-making (scientists from many parts of the world contributed to Webb, and of course the accumulation of thousands of years of human wisdom underpinned the entire endeavor), might help inspire us in solving our difficulties closer to home.
The next day there were more pictures from Webb, each one more spectacular, more glorious than the next. One of them was a side-by-side comparison of pictures taken of the same speck of sky by the Hubble telescope and by Webb. By looking deeper, Webb had been able to see so much more, and so much clearer; had uncovered what had not been visible before. Perhaps that’s also what is needed here on Earth. Maybe it will help if we try to look deeper and try to understand more about each other and the challenges we face.
We, the planet, and everything living on it will, I sadly fear, sink deeper into the inferno that is climate change before we rise from that hell and heal. (I am not willing to entertain the possibility that we won’t.) Of course, I am by no means suggesting that simply feeling uplifted and energized by Webb’s astounding accomplishments—or by any other joyful experience—will alleviate climate change. I know that I must continue, and even increase my efforts to be mindful of my actions, to do my small part to tread lightly on the Earth, to advocate on her behalf, to value her gifts. I respectfully submit that we all must. But my experience with the Webb photo on July 11 reminded me that it is in touching joy—even just a thimbleful of joy, in the myriad and unique ways we all have—that we will find the strength to do those things.
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Earlier this year, we celebrated our daughter’s 30th birthday with a small ritual that has long been a tradition in our family. On every birthday, and on our wedding anniversary, we make time to review some of the best moments of the previous year. Since this was a significant birthday for our daughter, we upped the ante. This time we reviewed the highlights of the past thirty years! Unachievable in a week, preposterous in an hour. Still, we tried. Over a leisurely, celebratory breakfast, the three of us recalled and reminisced about favorite family vacations and outings, special concerts—ones we played, ones we attended—plays we’d seen, books we’d read, graduations, weddings, and other milestones. And we laughed about misadventures that were not funny at the time but have, with the passage of time, become hilarious.