“Of course, the world continues to end”: Weather and the Climate Crisis Ordinary

The sense of slow-motion apocalypse indexed in my title, spoken by a character in Jenny Offill's 2020 novel Weather, resonates widely. In early 2020 — just a few weeks before the novel coronavirus shut the world down — Time magazine declared Weather "a Doomsday Novel We All Can Relate To."1 Erica Jong praised its "relentless tracking of everyday life and observations that show us how far the ordinary is from ordinary."2 Almost cheerful in its resignation, the casually tossed-off description of what Lauren Berlant might have called "crisis ordinariness" is uttered by Sylvia, an academic who quits her job at a climate change foundation and moves to the middle of the New Mexico desert.3 The move crystalizes the cynicism Sylvia manifests throughout the novel. She tells an anxious parent that the best way to protect her child from the impacts of climate change would be to become very rich; she wryly refers to the conclusion of one of her articles as the "obligatory note of hope."4 

An echo of that hopefulness is conveyed, ironically enough, in the rising popular and critical attention to climate grief. Climate grief designates the feeling of loss that attaches to the changes resulting from global warming — changes that can be rapid and devastating, like the mass displacement resulting from flooding or wildfires, or slower, like the melting of a glacier.5 Along with its partner, eco-anxiety, climate grief has become the affective chronometer of the present: it clocks not just how we feel about the times in which we live, but how those feelings themselves make time. We mourn losses not only in the present but also in the future — an apocalyptic future brought closer by the ongoing intensification of those present-tense disasters.

The desire to live time meaningfully endows grief with a presumptive ethical edge over anxiety and depression. Anxiety's shapelessness makes us, well, anxious; depression's flatness leaves us flat. But grief, through long use, has been burnished toward a recognizable form, harnessed to stories that emphasize its paradoxically hopeful qualities. The first of these is that grief is valuable: it testifies to the depth of our attachment to the object(s) that we mourn, and therefore to their worthiness. The second is that it's universal: as isolating as grief may feel, everyone who loves eventually experiences it, and that commonality is imagined as the very basis of the social bond in liberal society. The third is that it's productive: that attention to the first two qualities teaches us that properly managed grief can and should make us better people — kinder, more sympathetic to others, more involved in community efforts. Ultimately, then, even as we yearn for the lost past, grief — if we live it right — is said to move us forward, toward an enhanced future.6

These stories have deep roots in U.S. sentimental culture, which is to say, taken together, they establish an affective economy that holds itself apart from the world of capital even as it exists alongside it. Some things, they insist, matter more than profit; some forms run deeper than the money-form. Writing about environmental grief frequently calls on these anti-capitalist convictions, since capitalism itself has brought that grief about. "Eco-grief and anxiety," Jennifer Atkinson observes, "arise from the recognition that our existence and wellbeing are entwined with other lives — an insight that's fundamentally missing from our modern worldview and consumer way of life. Remembering how intimately our lives are bound up with others will be key to undoing this legacy and ensuring our collective survival."7 Along with the values grief illuminates, Atkinson maps the progressive arc that permits them to manifest. The realization of interconnectedness in the present counters the mourner's fixation on loss, and the prospect of a better future becomes visible from the perspective of this enhanced present. Whereas loss ruptures time, the social bonds that are illuminated and enabled by mourning restore its flow.      

Managed in this way, grief opens a path to hope. The aspirational future invoked in considerations of climate grief is built upon on the commonsense assumption that taking action is a form of healing. Indeed, the American Psychological Association recommends that therapists guide people suffering from climate grief and trauma toward actions like reducing their carbon footprint and involving themselves in community resilience efforts.8 This assumption recalls the traditional Christian insistence that grief ought to lead to greater dedication to God and community. Replacing God with well-being, climate grief provides an occasion for secular spirituality, a kind of devotional environmentalism. Born of rupture, it is taken up as a mode of repair.

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But what happens when this idealized trajectory fails — when the affective fullness and narrative promise of climate grief give way to the plodding tenacity of climate depression? Depression is grief's ungainly cousin. Devoid of the cultural value that object-loss confers on mournfulness, it lacks grief's clarity; it feels, Ann Cvetkovich observes, like going nowhere — like "blockage or impasse or being stuck."9 Depression suggests isolation and inactivity, and hence is often dismissed as laziness or self-indulgence. And though it speaks insistently, incessantly, of its presence, it seems to tell no particular story.10

Given how depressing cli-fi tends to be, one might reasonably view it as the genre that corresponds to climate depression. But most cli-fi novels abound with story, at once generating and vividly depicting the profound grief and trauma that accompany the climate disasters which fill their pages or predate their dystopian worlds. Offill's Weather constitutes a different genre — something like depressive realism. Instead of cli-fi's drama, it conforms to depression's storylessness; lacking catharsis, it is uncomfortably numb.

The novel is narrated by a thirtyish white woman, Lizzie, a librarian and PhD dropout who lives with her husband Ben and young son Eli in Brooklyn. They're members of the middle-class precariat, which is to say, the wolf isn't quite at the door, but their car's headlight is held on by duct tape and Lizzie worries about how she can afford to help out her elderly mother. To earn extra money, she takes a part-time job answering emails for Sylvia, her former academic mentor. Sylvia's lectures on climate change and the contents of the emails catalyze Lizzie's climate depression and anxiety; she spends more and more time going down internet rabbit holes researching tipping points, climate departure, and eventually apocalyptic prepper websites. "Lizzie's become a crazy doomer," Ben reports to their friends.11

Weather doesn't have much in the way of a plot. Rather, it moves in time to the slowly rising sound of bleakness. In one scene, Lizzie walks down the street and doesn't realize she's crying till a man passing her calls out "Boohoo."12 Sylvia identifies the people who email her as either crazy or depressed, and Lizzie hopes it's the former — presumably because it's depressing how much sense their crazy questions have come to make. "What will disappear from stores first? Why do humans need myths? Do we live in the Anthropocene? . . . Is it wrong to eat meat? What is surveillance capitalism? How can we save the bees? What is the internet of things? When will humans become extinct?"13      

The new normal outlined in these questions consists of hovering in place, awaiting the coming disaster. Trump is elected a third of the way through the novel, which one might expect to make the story more eventful. Lizzie does sense a "hum" in the air that reminds her how it felt to be in New York after 9/11. When she tries to talk to an Iranian friend about it, he replies, "Your people have finally fallen into history . . . The rest of us are already here."14 Yet the insanity of the Trump era is quickly folded into everyday life. Lizzie and Ben scrabble vaguely in the direction of the past, hoping it will help them understand what's going on: she starts reading about Vichy France, he digs into a book about the history of war. But the novel mostly eddies in the affect-laden present tense, going nowhere in particular.

As Berlant argues, we first perceive the historical present affectively.15 Flat affect deliberately underperforms that perception; it is not, Berlant points out, solely an "expressive ontology," but an "overdetermined style," not just an index of the emptied-out world but a story that is being told — or undertold — about it.16 Weather's flatness absorbs the noise of neoliberalism and the crisis ordinary of climate change into an anhedonic apprehension of the loss of what Berlant calls the "good-life fantasy," the secure middle-class comfort historically promised to Americans, usually white ones. The novel is punctuated by bursts of humorless humor; a number of jokes that aren't all that funny are strewn across the pages, interrupting the undertelling of the story. These act at once as a defense against and an embrace of grief, as though comedy is another of the things we're losing. 

As her reading choices might suggest, the hum Lizzie hears is filtered through a kind of white noise, carrying with it an indistinct awareness of the racial and class privilege that limns their corner of the precariat. Sylvia's audiences give off a similar buzz. After attending her first conference, Lizzie reflects, "One thing I'll say about it: lots of people who are not Native Americans talking about Native Americans."17 The genocidal settler fantasy of whiteness as the motor of progress has collapsed for these white liberals, but they remain stalled, unable or unwilling to come up with another form. After the election, Lizzie tells off a racist neighbor; she stops taking the car service that she couldn't really afford but used because she felt bad for the owner after he unleashes an Islamophobic tirade. For the most part, though, she retreats into the internet. She stocks up on lighters and memorizes advice about disaster planning even though, as she realizes when a run for the bus winds her, she's never going to make it. She is stuck not because she can't imagine a future: she can, though it's a bad one. It's the present she can't catch up to.

In the summer of 2022, the moment of this writing, massive flooding left a third of Pakistan underwater; wildfires in the mountains of Northern Morocco displaced over a thousand people; heatwaves roasted Africa, Europe, and the Western US; a prolonged drought in China dried up the Yangtze River. In the face of global climate-induced trauma, mere depression feels, paradoxically, like privilege. My intent here is not to call out those of us who possess it. It is to understand the story it (under)tells: that of the present as a scene of blockage, marking the increased inaccessibility of the good-life fantasy. But the supposedly universal address of that fantasy was always the thinnest of fictions anyway. For those who once identified with it, its waning is the affective correlate and material consequence of the eroded infrastructures that might have mitigated the impact of climate disasters, as well as the persistent failure of a political system that missed chance after chance to lessen their likelihood. Climate depression speaks of a lack of conviction that anything might emerge from those ruins. The flow of time will not be restored; there is no reconstructed good life to look forward to, only waiting around for the disaster to continue to arrive.

As an example of depressive realism, Weather enjoys a particular kind of luxury: the luxury of uninflected introspection, intentionally underscoring the lack of an organizing principle by means of which its characters might engage a world that is at once fiercely raging and slowly (though increasingly not-so-slowly) dying.18 It is a luxury chiefly enjoyed by middle-class white writers. This is not because depression is a white thing, but because depression is officially recognized in white people far more often than in BIPOC people, both medically and culturally.19 Hence a genre committed to representing it is likely to tilt toward them.      

Depression in this context operates as both diagnosis of the threadbare good-life fantasy and defense against its loss. It contains both the undertold account of a broken-down understanding of the kind of life worth living, and, beneath its stasis, a grounding assumption that one will be permitted to go on living in proximity to the promise of that life, no matter what one does. Jong's assessment of the novel's "relentless tracking of everyday life" threatens to reproduce this type of assumption as it sidesteps the need to consider how racially inflected the rhythms of the everyday are. The weather, in Weather, indexes climate change: it is a site of slowly rising dread. In Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, though, the weather signals the centuries-long pervasive climate of antiblackness: it is the site of untold violence, but also a provocation to resistance and to care.20 And as she elsewhere reminds us, "weathering" is also a term used for the "long-term deleterious effects of antiblackness on black women"—including the frequent depression and grief that goes unrecognized by whites.21

This sort of "weather," and this weathering, are rarely taken up in contemporary discussions of climate depression and anxiety. As Sarah Jacquette Ray points out, "The prospect of an unlivable future has always shaped the emotional terrain for Black and brown people . . . Exhaustion, anger, hope — the effects of oppression and resistance are not unique to this climate moment. What is unique is that people who had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future." Yet if attention to racial justice is not part of that awakening, white resource-hoarding will, she predicts, be exacerbated, not mitigated, by the affects clustering around it. 22 The universalizing consciousness supposedly brought about by grief will collapse in upon itself, leading only to a tighter, more selfish grasp on what is felt to be slipping away.

Weather is not unaware of this need for racial justice, though it makes few moves to address it. A vague embarrassment about white privilege, juxtaposed to the ongoing constraints of the middle-class precariat, suffuses the ending of the novel, which gestures weakly toward the forms of resolution made possible when grief, rather than depression, appears as the keynote of the present. After Lizzie almost has an affair with a man she meets in a bar, she and Ben develop a new mode of togetherness amidst the ruins of late-late capitalism: Ben's climate anxiety increases and he joins Lizzie in her planning for the apocalypse. Lizzie and Ben's happily-ever-after of shared doomerism recollects the deathbound direction of the marital vow even as it mimes the fulfillment of the couple form. The deliberate irony attached to this new connectedness suggests the persistence of those capitalist ruins and their affective drain even on bodies situated, for the moment, away from the front lines of disaster. Lizzie finds the time and money to go to the dentist and fix a broken crown, but continues to grind her teeth in her sleep.

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The same wobble between grief's promise of solace and the depressive grind characterizes the "obligatory note of hope" upon which the book closes — a URL, obligatorynoteofhope.com, printed alone on a page past the end of the story.23 Tacking —.com onto the cynical phrase that characterizes the perfunctory conclusions to Sylvia's lectures feels overdetermined; as Min Hyoung Song aptly observes elsewhere in this cluster, "[i]t suggests there's something almost marketable about the hopeful ending, a way to confirm for the reader like an advertiser's reassuring messages during times of disruption that the crisis is manageable and there are responsible people working deliberately to do the managing." The website to which the URL delivers readers willing to type it in, or click the link if they're reading online, effectively disavows Lizzie's depressive conclusion and the author's own inclinations to the same. Instead, it directs readers toward collective action as a remedy for "fatalism": "There's a way in for everyone. Aren't you tired of all this fear and dread?"

Heather Houser cites this "hopeful ending" as a sign of climate writing's "stuckness": it is one of a handful of "tics" that writers have stuffed into the places where new forms and imaginaries ought to be.24 This stuckness is not a matter of content. As an opening beyond the ending, the site wants to move us forward, to become unstuck; it aspires to help people "imagine and create a future we want to live in." Rather, it is a problem of narrative form: its presentation of hope as an "antidote to . . . dithering and despair." The therapeutic impulse expressed on the page attempts to rewrite the story from elsewhere, to restore the climate-depressed subject to the flow of time. It seeks, in effect, to trade the dignity of grief for the ungainliness of depression, to help people feel good about the way they're feeling bad.

The imperative to construct new imaginaries is not in itself a bad thing. The problem comes when depression is dismissed as "dithering," hovering in place of action, a failure to pursue a positive direction, which needs to be corrected or cured before anything meaningful can happen. In political contexts, this isn't an uncommon move. As José Esteban Muñoz has written, "negative sentiments" like depression and cynicism "are often seen as solipsistic, individualistic, and anti-communal affective stances associated with an emotional tonality of hopelessness."25 But such sentiments also attune us to the grim realities that surround us; hopeless as they may seem, they are still ways of engaging the world, of living with its damage. Nor are they inherently inert or paralyzing sentiments. Lisa Duggan, in dialogue with Muñoz, contends that hopelessness is not always the opposite of hope; critical hope, hope that resists the reduction of human existence, operates in a dialectical rather than purely antithetical relationship with despair.26 Duggan and Muñoz assert that one can "take the risk of hope with full knowledge of the possibility, even the certainty, of failure."27 Sounding a "note of hope" doesn't necessarily signal an end to depression; the two can exist contrapuntally, hope vibrating against and through, but not necessarily overcoming, the flat weightiness of depressive time.

I am aware that this may sound suspiciously like a "hopeful ending." It's also a depressed one. To be honest, I have no idea how to end this essay. I wanted to just stop, like the final episode of The Sopranos. But that type of ending can confuse the reader, who is left wondering if something was omitted, and I don't want to be rude. And there really is no obvious stopping point. Weather was released in early 2020; one can imagine what Lizzie's browser history might have looked like during COVID lockdown. The man Lizzie almost has an affair with goes off to live in the forests of Quebec, a location that, in the novel, seems restorative, but after the 2023 wildfires resonates very differently. The end of the world keeps on keeping on; the best that can be said of the slow-motion apocalypse is that it always keeps us guessing. Or as Lizzie, in the novel's only direct address to the reader, puts it:

"And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time."28

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Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her book How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century U.S. is forthcoming from Duke University Press in January 2024. She is a member of the editorial collective of Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, a new open-access journal, and is currently at work on a monograph titled Time and Again: The Affective Circuits of Spirit Photography.

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