A meditation on the world’s end, at solstice

Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders has been a favorite of mine for a long time. It’s a longish tome, a yarn of two families living out their complicated, superstition-and-hunger-driven histories during the final century of that island’s habitation by the descendants of Norse Vikings. In the story, the weather is changing inexorably, and the European settlers adapt as best as they can, trying to maintain their religion, losing little by little all the trappings of their culture; by the last page, the reader knows the end is coming, and soon.

The tired adjective "indomitable" has been used to describe heroines from Scarlett to Emma, but it seems to me it was made for the book’s main character, Margret. She survives misstep after trial after humiliation, as well as the death or disappearance of everyone dear to her, with the dignity and grace that I’ve striven for most of my life.

So I’ve reread the book enough to predict most of the dialogue; but I’m thinking about picking it up again, anyway. Because it seems to me that it has another lesson to teach.

This afternoon I listened to a diplomat muse on the climate change talks in Copenhagen, and their final lack of commitment by anyone, to do anything. He blamed this disaster on China’s government. He also considered the humiliation of the President of the United States dealing with some apparachik, instead of an actual member of the Chinese government, who might be able to affect the actions of a country whose agreement to a meaningful behavioral change is crucial to the aversion of global disaster.

I hated this as much as the diplomat, but it made perfect sense to me; it’s what creditors and debtors do. I don’t get to talk directly to anybody remotely in charge of my credit card company, either. The most I can do when they raise my APR to some usurious level is make nasty comments on the customer satisfaction survey they inexplicably send me a few days later.

It was, in the end, like listening to the news of the Filipino volcano, though. There was nothing I could do about the climate talks, or the level of indebtedness of this country to foreign governments and citizens, but take the blame for my share. No, I didn’t vote for George W. Bush and through my actions help bring about his ruinous tax cuts and wars. But I didn’t do all that much to stop them, either. And my own behavior has been just as fiscally irresponsible as that of my country’s, albeit on a smaller scale.

So, like the Greenlanders, I know disaster is coming. Whether we will end up on Cormac McCarthy’s road, or in some less spectacularly awful denouement, we all know that life can’t go on as before. Smiley’s characters adapted by spending entire winters slowly starving huddled in their beds, hoping to hobble out in the increasingly later springs, as the Little Ice Age descended. Who knows what adaptations we will have to make.

In the meantime, the holidays are here. Jake’s DSi, bought on credit of course, is hidden in a drawer, and I have two boys getting ready to spend the evening cutting out sugar cookies and the night giggling in their attic lair. We’ve eaten our spaghetti and meatballs; for breakfast I’ll make them crepes, and I know I’ll wake up to some extraterrestrial war erupting from the Playstation set. I’ll be like the Greenlanders, maintaining tradition and custom in the fortuitously falling snow, whatever disaster may come in the coming years.

Every year I find some excuse to read , to some group of children whose education I’m in charge of, O Henry’s Gift of the Magi. I’ve seen the parodies; I know the story’s a cliché. But my voice still breaks, every time, on the final line. "They are the Magi." Perhaps, as long as we have these kinds of Magi in our midst, we’ll be OK. Perhaps.