Not infrequently in and around Union Grove, insanity and suicide prevail. "Depression" was a word the residents of Union Grove had dropped, according to Robert, because "despair was a spiritual condition that was as real to us as the practical difficulties we struggled with in everyday life." (17) And on another occasion he states, "I tried to avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you. I was alone now."
In terms of an immediate family, Robert was alone, but in ways that were both poignant and lovely, he was held in a community of survivors and friends who assisted each other with dogged loyalty and a quality of compassion that neither cynicism nor despondency could erode. The spirit of cooperation demonstrated by the Union Grove survivors was stunning-so much so that the reader must acknowledge it as one of the most desirable byproducts of collapse.
I didn't need to begin the first chapter of World Made By Hand to be moved to tears. That began when I opened the book to a quote by my favorite poet, Rilke, immediately following the dedication:
Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
Your path struggles on through incomprehensible
Mankind. All the more futile perhaps
For keeping its own direction,
Keeping on toward the future,
Toward what has been lost.
Every time that I have allowed myself to deeply and graphically imagine, without restraint or rationalization, a post-collapse world, I experience a bone-marrow sorrow and a palpable sense of loss that defy words. Jim Kunstler has captured those emotions masterfully in World Made By Hand. In fact, this novel provides extraordinary reinforcement for an ongoing theme to which I've devoted a great deal of writing in the past year, namely, how can we possibly expect to prepare ourselves to live in a post-petroleum, post-collapse world by attending only to the stockpiling of food, water, land, and skills without emotional and spiritual preparation? How can we not acquire the tools necessary for navigating the emotions of sorrow, despair, overwhelm, grief, rage, terror, and yes, clinical as it may sound, depression? What will give us meaning? What will console us? What will allow us to keep going when any sense of purpose has eluded us? And perhaps most importantly, how will we communicate with each other? How will we skillfully and compassionately speak our truth and listen deeply to each other? What specific skills in these areas do we need to learn and practice right now? Personally, I find it difficult to believe that the residents of Union Grove, or any other post-collapse community, could function as harmoniously as they do in the novel without transforming the interpersonal land mines all of us have incorporated from living in the soul-murdering milieu of industrial civilization.
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