Book Report: Desert Notebooks

22. Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020) (9/4/20)

This book begins with a walk in a desert wash, and an owl. It ends much the same way. But in between is a vast exploration of time, of myth, of change, of place, of faith, of history, of life. The owl and deserts, as well as the nature of time, are themes throughout.

I loved this book. It does feel like a writer's notebook, with sometimes very short (two-sentence) sections of description or musing, sometimes longer mini-essays on a larger topic. As such, it constantly changes course, taking the reader in new, and always fascinating directions. There is Lilith of the Bible, the creation tale of the K'iche' Maya, the Ghost Dance, rock art; there is also present-day politics, the climate crisis, Palestine, and Las Vegas. And so much more. It's impossible to summarize, except to say it's a deep meditation on what it is to be alive in the America of today. In that regard, it is not especially optimistic. We are not living in a pretty time. But more than that, it is a meditation on  lived experience, how we interact with the world.

I flagged many, many passages. Here are two as a sampling. The first describes Ehrenreich's perception of time while living in war-torn Ramallah in 2014:

Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.
 I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I've felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino's [Trump's] election. I don't know what to call it. The time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears to fall apart.

I would say this is even more true of life in the time of Covid-19, which hadn't hit yet when he wrote this book. Though yes, it was bad enough simply with Trump at the helm and things otherwise "as usual."

And here's a bit on the Mesopotamian understanding of the universe, pasted onto the present day:

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read. Which means there could be no line between the reader and the written. You, who are reading this, you too are written, you too can be read. And I, a writer, am already written through and through. Everything between us, everything that separates us, mountains, stars, years, shimmering thoughts and dreams that die with waking, all of it is a single chain of signs that do not point to another reality, only to this one, all at once.

I could quote more, but as I said: it's difficult to pin this book down. So I'll leave it at that. Like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, I could definitely see reading this book all over again and finding it just as stimulating. 

I looked at Goodreads to see what people thought, and most people either loved it (*****) or hated it (*), in the latter case because the author, in the very first sentence, calls Trump “the Rhino” (appropriately, if you ask me)—those folks simply objected to the name-calling, never mind what was actually in the book—or else because the book isn’t really about the desert in all its glory. That’s exactly what I liked about it, though: the book is about the desert and so much more, and it’s about our present moment, which is awful in so many ways, and yet time marches, spirals, wings us into an other time, inevitably. This won’t last forever. With any grace from the gods, it won’t last more than two more months. But yes, we’ve made it through awful times before, and we’ll do it again. Even as we keep on changing the planet. And that, too, has happened before, over and over. Nothing new under the sun. But that said, this present moment is in itself something of a miracle. Both at once. Ain't it amazing?