The twilight before a cataclysm

Anxious times, property headaches, and what matters when everything feels fragile

Barcelona at Sunset

My Hungarian climber friend brought me a book over the Summer, when he came to visit from Budapest—Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb.

A young couple, traveling through Italy on their honeymoon, though with a growing sense of unrest between them. “Wandering from city to city, with his marriage rapidly falling apart, Mihály must confront the ghosts of his past and try to find a sense of purpose,” says the back cover.

The year? 1937.

I’ve often wondered what it’s like to live in the waning moments of a world order about to collapse into cataclysm. And the novel has an answer: it’s a lot like living through any other time.

The author, Szerb, appears to have no sense of what is about to come. Hungary at the time was led by a right-wing Christian nationalist government allied with Germany. Szerb’s characters travel through an Italy ruled by Mussolini, but their thoughts are preoccupied with the beauty of the countryside, their own personal relationships, and their place in the world.

Because of course they are.

They’re like the fish in the famous speech from David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Except that I’m getting the distinct sense that someone is about to pull the drain plug and flush it all down the drain.

I. This moment in Barcelona

Barcelona right now feels full of bleeding-heart anti-capitalists. I’m in a Spanish conversation class with one of them now. Capitalism is so all-consuming that we can’t even imagine a different way to organize society, she said in class last week.

Young people today talk like revolutionaries. In 1937, socialists were fighting a losing war right here in the streets outside our classroom—a torrent of violence and mass executions so that Spain could sit out the coming global cataclysm and spend the following three decades living under Franco’s dictatorship.

This young socialist in my class was speaking much like I imagine the ones of old, ready to overthrow the existing order in search of something more “just,” if only they had the power to do so. They see the system around them as misery brought about by settler colonialists, inequality forced on us by billionaires, and above all, injustice brought about by racism, power, and corruption.¹

I mean, here is an expat young person from the U.S. living in Barcelona who spends their days organizing their creative thoughts into a “second brain” along the lines of tech bro Tiago Forte, preaching to me about injustice and about how we should overthrow the existing world order.

I’m not scared that young people like this will actually take up arms to bring about this unspecified new world order—I’m worried they’ll stand by, scared stiff, as someone else takes power for themselves. After all, my classmate said, I’m a pacifist.

Interesting how the varying ideologies co-exist.

II. The right problems

After class last Friday, I drove to visit my friends in the mountains and climb some rocks.

The husband is working on a new book about how liberalism can start winning again by crafting policies that speak to core, evolutionary values that exist in all of us by nature. I don’t know if he’s right, but I think the questions he’s working on are the correct ones.

Meanwhile, the wife is working on a new round of funding for her early-stage startup and wrestling with difficult problems about the extent to which capitalism can be harnessed to address the harms of incumbent, profit-driven industries. Should she create a product that helps bad companies do less harm, at the risk of propping up an immoral industry? It’s a difficult moral problem.

Oh—and she is eight months pregnant.

My Spanish classmate, of course, isn’t sure whether they want to bring kids into this world.

The husband and I spent the weekend climbing at two new cliffs in the area, the rock still sharp, the skin on our fingers chaffed away until raw. By the end, my muscles were as worked as they had been in months. It felt amazing.

Climbing as therapy, as always.

III. Choosing your frustrations

After, I drove to my property in Cornudella de Montsant, to the renovation project that has sat stagnant for much of the last year.

I needed to check on a leak my neighbors had reported while I’ve been away, my attention focused elsewhere. My neighbor across the street had texted me that he’d heard a strong dripping sound through the front door, and could see the ground wet underneath. Fortunately, the water shutoff can be accessed from the outside, which is exactly what my neighbor did as soon as he saw.

Headaches like this have been creeping up in all my properties.

In New Mexico, at the townhouse I’ve owned since my 20s, torrential desert storms created a roof leak, which went unaddressed by both the tenant and the property manager. Mold was eventually reported; remediation had to be done; the roof needed to be replaced, interior insulation and drywall still to be repaired.

At my farmhouse in New Hampshire, the new, gravity-fed well line we put in last year suddenly stopped working just as my mom, who has been living there the last five years, was in Spain visiting my son and I. The alarm system I’d installed to warn if water levels were low in the cistern had failed. And now we were troubleshooting with the housesitter via WhatsApp from across the ocean.

Fortunately, the Cornudella leak turned out to be small. It was on the ground floor, a pinhole leak in the copper pipe just after the water meter. Nothing in the house had been damaged. It would be a relatively easy fix, and besides, I had wanted to redo the lines for a while.

But the property headaches were adding up. I really didn’t want any of this stress in my life, if I’m honest. The older I get, the more choosy I’ve become with what kind of frustrations I’m willing to put up with.

IV. Continuing on

I’m nearly done with Journey By Moonlight. Will the characters find purpose in their life? Will the unrequited love that Mihály pined for as a rebellious youth finally be satiated?

Will all of this resolve itself before Hitler marches on Poland?

“The U.S. right now is giving off definitive late-stage, fall of empire,” vibes, I texted my sister in Santa Fe, who had just sent me a meme about the impending fall of civilization. But her oldest son is doing very well in the new Waldorf charter school there, it’s reported.

Here in Barcelona, I find my emotions are in a particularly raw state, brought about entirely by personal issues, and having nothing to do with the state of the world. Crippling anxiety about world events serves no one, I keep telling people. But crippling self-doubt about my way of existing in the world, well… That’s my own struggle.

I am reminded that entire lifetimes can be lived, children born and raised, loves won and lost, in the twilight before a cataclysm. We continue on as best we can. And hopefully, we choose our time on this earth wisely, however limited it may be.

1. I only felt compelled to point out that this is the same system that has lifted 1.5 billion people out of extreme poverty just in the time since I was a teenager. That’s approximately 50 million people every year no longer living below subsistence—brought to you by none other than the capitalist, globablist neo-liberal order.