Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Sherrell is an organizer born in 1990. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate justice legislation in New York and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in creative nonfiction. Warmth is his first book.
 

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Correspondence

On April 14, 2018, a civil rights lawyer named David Buckel burned himself alive in Prospect Park. He did it alone, just before sunrise, a brief illumination on a peripheral lawn. A cyclist found his body in a circle of char, though she had to pass by several times to be sure of what she'd seen. Later, she told reporters: it was hard to make myself believe it.

The suicide was well planned, even courteous. Buckel had cleared a ring of dirt around himself to keep the flames from spreading. "I apologize to you for the mess" read a note found by the police in a shopping cart next to the scene. A longer letter had already been emailed out to the press. This was an "early death by fossil fuel," it read. "It reflects what we are doing to ourselves."

I spent most of that day across town in Central Park. I remember it was gorgeous outside and the lakes were all crowded with rowboats, little schools of them flitting back and forth behind the curtain of the willows. I found a perch on top of a small hill and watched the loop road swell with people. Somewhere out of sight, a stoplight was releasing them in pulses: the tourists in their carriages, the cyclists, the loping Rollerbladers. They passed quickly and suddenly, then a beat of empty road, and then the unseen light changed once more, presumably, and the next wave came streaming past. The scene reminded me of a Bruegel painting IÕd first come across in a history textbook: a landscape of a village in winter, painted from atop a nearby hill. In it, you can see hunters and woodcutters going about their business, ice-skaters crisscrossing a pond, chimneys smoking in snow. According to the textbook, this painting was meant somehow to delineate the beginning of the Renaissance. As if all it took was a small vantage, the right flow of people, to funnel the whole historical watershed.

After a while, I fell asleep in the grass, and when I woke up the temperature had dropped and the picnics dissipated. The few people still out seemed in a hurry to get home. I walked back through the park toward the East Side, past the closing museums, past the expensive boutiques that mimicked the museums, single handbags underlit in glass display cases. Then down the stairs to the train, which I took back to the Bronx. It was only once I stepped into my darkened apartment that I saw the news from Prospect Park, glancing past it on my phone and then scrolling slowly back up, registering what I'd read.

What struck me even more than the tragedy-and it did strike me, a slow onset, so that I failed to make dinner that night, and eventually, at a loss for what to do once I finally tore myself from the screen, went to bed without ever having turned on the lights-was how quickly the event, this flicker of violence, was subsumed once more into the general mill of the park. Was forgotten, essentially. Beyond the cordon of police tape, the newspapers reported, the barbecues continued as normal, the corporate kickball games resumed. Participants in a charity walk strode industriously by in matching purple T-shirts, which predicted, in cursive quotes, that an end to pancreatic cancer was at hand. Wage Hope, the shirts read. The moment had rolled on, in other words. And I'm only being partially rhetorical when I ask you: What else could it have possibly done?

Afterward, I felt irrationally like I should have been able to detect some ripple when it happened, a subtle shock wave passing from his park to mine, like a bell tolled to part one hour from the next. Undoubtedly the news alerts had been piling up in my pocket, but I'd set my phone on silent and so hadn't felt even those regular vibrations I'd grown accustomed to associating with tragedy. While the man burned-the flames carbonizing his skin, then evaporating his blood-I hadn't felt a thing. It had been a beautiful day, and as I said, I'd spent much of it asleep.

Several days after the immolation, I took an afternoon walk with my mother. We were strolling in circles around a smaller park near my apartment, a third park, St. Mary's, this one less manicured than the other two. The cracked paths bristled with weeds that had sprouted eagerly at that first whisper of spring and then died once again in the ensuing cold snap. They looked brittle now, almost burnt. Apropos of very little, I had told her about the suicide and how sad I was about it. Which was not, in that moment, entirely true. In fact, I was often pathologically adaptive to news about the Problem, and that morning had woken up feeling completely fine, no longer able to access the pain I'd felt just days ago, like I'd stepped out of a room and had it lock behind me. My hope was that invoking the word "sadness" would somehow resurrect the emotion for us both. That I could cast the word like a spell and have it conjure between us an instant commiseration, obviating language altogether, which often struck me as plainly inadequate to any real consideration of the Problem. Though when this didnÕt work-and it never did-IÕd fall back on the usual bromides, letting them drop lamely into conversation. "I feel overwhelmed" is what I said on this particular occasion. "It's such a tragedy, and everyone's already forgotten." It was true, the news cycle had moved inexorably onward, though I still had a few emails at the bottom of my inbox with subject lines like "Rest in Peace," or, in some cases, "Fwd: Re: Rest in Peace."

My mother buried her chin into her scarf, listening. "He must have been kind of crazy," she said, sounding apprehensive, like she wanted to hear me agree. We walked in silence for a moment, past an empty playground, a row of old oaks. In the distance some men were playing soccer, and we watched the ball arc high above their heads.

I didn't think he was crazy, I told her finally, looking down at my feet. From what I knew his life had been normal, even honorable. He'd spent decades winning legal battles for LGBTQ rights before retiring and turning his attention to the Problem. In his last years he'd founded a large-scale composting program, sequestering more and more carbon even as he watched global emissions tick upward. Reading about his death, a part of me had understood exactly where he was coming from. I'd often thought about it myself, I admitted-staging the perfect self-sacrifice, something to drive a lightning rod through the public discourse, a suicide that would finally make the Problem personal. Of course it sounded embarrassing when I said it, messianic and delusional. And I chose not to even mention the specific and melodramatic scenarios that I had at one point or another entertained in the back of my head. Climbing to the top of a smokestack and plunging in, for instance. Or monitoring the weather for the next freak hurricane and then waiting on the beach as the rain picked up and the last bungalow renters pulled out of their driveways until finally the flood would come and wash me far inland and then back out to sea. I'd even run through some of the logistics, like how I'd need to bring bolt cutters in case the smokestack had some sort of grate on top. Or how it would help to rig a GoPro setup before the storm hit, in case the TV cameras weren't there to capture the moment I went under.

"I can't believe you're telling me this," my mother said, lifting her head from her scarf so that we both had to stand there and look at each other. The sun was beginning to set, and we could hear shouts from the field behind us. Someone had scored a goal.

"I'm not depressed," I told her, which was true. For a twenty-something who spent an above-average portion of his time thinking or trying not to think about the end of the world, I was, to my surprise and...