Happy Nice Mall

Perhaps what has changed for me is the newfound and intense interest in Local. I don’t know about the retreat of the glaciers, but I do know that armed Fulani herders raped my uncle’s house in Jos, Nigeria. I don’t know about marine isotope stages, but I do know what my firefighter cousin told me about the various powers of his job. I don’t know the world, but I do know downtown New Haven.

People have already asked me for solutions to our climate situation – the me who scrambled the TV channels for so long a few years ago that I missed the opening minutes of a Super Bowl. I don’t have a policy prescription and I have even less faith in their implementation, but I have faith in horses. Or rather, something that horses can do to us sometimes. For us. I believe in books, stories, that alchemical way of telling someone that they are not alone.

Ten and a half years ago I was working on a Barnes & Noble campus and one of my colleagues had just finished reading “The Way” by Cormac McCarthy. As a disclaimer, she said she’s not a big reader. But he had just had a son, and he claimed that when he read the book, it changed the way he looked at the world around him, the way he looked at his newborn son, the way he looked at his family instead. I like to think it’s because he sees something of himself in the characters. A possible future metaphorizing the difficulty of caring for his ancestry? An imitation of her relationship with her own father? Something else entirely? I don’t know, but whatever was conveyed, the fact of communication meant that he wasn’t alone during that reading time.

“What is reality?” In response to the question, I promised myself that I would not write anything rude about representation. So I will say that I think suffering is inevitable, whatever our future may be. The future of climate dystopia has already arrived everywhere in the Pacific, in the Sahel, in central Europe, on the east and west coasts of North America, and is most felt by those among us who are least felt, always abandoned. If that were my whole reality, despair would be the order of the day. But I turn to God as a substrate, not as a patina. I return to the idea that there is an order, an Author, everything and horses. They appear in the post-apocalyptic era of “Goliath” in those who are the least among us, who for some reason have always been abandoned. “You may have lost everything, but you did not lose me, whoever or whatever. There’s magic here too, at the end of the world.”

I have no God to give you, and I have no horses, but I have my books, my stories, my vow that you will not be alone during your engagement today, and the insane hope of tomorrow. , the same will apply.

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of “Riot Baby” and finally, “Goliath”