When a personal tragedy struck writer Denise Robbins at 22, she thought fiction was her path towards immortality.
And in many ways, it is. A genre that breathes life into what never existed, that gives voice to the voiceless.
Her latest book, The Unmapping, is not immortal though. And that’s ok, she told me recently.
A tale of two public servants struggling to understand a shifting New York City – literally, a city whose architecture shifts overnight – The Unmapping is not your traditional piece of climate fiction. It is not an apocalyptic warning. Nor is it complacent in its language.
It is a quiet nudge, urging you to consider what happens when the ground beneath your feet becomes negotiable. Of what happens when certainty becomes a luxury you can no longer afford, when you come to terms with the rest you desire leaving you for good. The kind of landscape where adaptation becomes a daily prayer, where learning to live with uncertainty transforms from crisis into craft. Systems, after all, have their own stubborn rhythms. For once a system gets out of sync, Robbins says, it can be very difficult to re-find that initial state, to reach equilibrium once again.
The real concern, however, is not an attempt to find that equilibrium. It’s a few steps back: it’s to understand what that equilibrium really is, and perhaps even more important, what it would mean to reach that state again.
An issue so everlooming and debated as climate change will never find such an answer. It will never grant the clarity to cut through clouds unscathed, to touch our skin not to harm it, but to draw nearer to it. Seneca once claimed that “if a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable,” but it was not an existential crisis that he once dealt with. It was the same death, the same complexities, the same human fragility that has always defined our relationship with uncertainty.
But it would never be as black and white, as similar. Imagine waking up within the same city, every single day, only to find that all of your surroundings – the fundamental structure, the architecture – had changed overnight. Finding a world that had left the prior day behind, leaving only the practice of learning to love what refuses to stay put.
Home isn’t a place that stays the same, after all. Home is learning. Home is a process. For the immortality Robbins sought wasn't in creating something permanent. It was in capturing the beauty of impermanence itself, piece by piece, word by word, until the fragments form something whole enough to hold.
This is really lovely. I enjoy your style.