Scholars' insights on Lost at Sea

This article includes the podcast audio and adapted transcript of Steve Mentz's July 13, 2010 lecture entitled "Lost at Sea: At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean" given in conjunction with Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger.

Listen to the podcast

This lecture is approximately 35 minutes.

Read the lecture transcript

What pain is it to go down like Jonah, all the way. What do the waters want, what’s at the bottom. At the surface the world breaks, columns of air shatter into devilish brilliance and beauty. You’re out, then you’re in. No middle and no ground. First come the riches of the upper ocean. Boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat. Everything we love is here, flashing, tumbling, cradling bodies and refracting light. Here, Noah’s flood never subsides. Here is world without end or limit. All subtle and submarine. Look into the fish’s eye and you see nothing. No strange analogy to something in yourself. Passing five full fathoms colors darken and grow heavy. The ribs and terrors of the whale press down. Monsters swim fast and fearful. No place to stay. They wink up at us from the depths, skulls with begemmed eye sockets, wedges of gold, encrusted anchors, heaps of pearl. Fish gnawed men and what’s become of a thousand fearful wrecks. Treasures of the slimy bottom. Captives of the envious flood. What we’re looking for. What’s there? Not just gold and death fragments. Not even pearls whose price we spent long since. The sea’s floor hides a full awfulness. A universal cannibalism, a two stranded lesson. Here went Jonah ten thousand fathoms down, weeds wrapped around his head and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Here Prospero’s book lies mudded. Here, God fugitives reach a place beyond rest. Two things, the real and final face of our world and the limit of what we can imagine touching. Bursting back to air and light we sing what we can and sell the rest remembering what we can’t salvage. No insular Tahiti.

That opening passage is one of the interludes in my book, and as some of you may have already recognized, it’s also a mash up of two famous literary passages: Clarence’s Dream of Drowning, and Shakespeare’s Richard III and Father Mapple’s sermon from an early chapter in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. What I’m trying to capture by bringing those, those two voices together and adding a little bit of leavening of my own, is something like the real facts of immersion. Of what really happens when we get pulled under. When we go into the watery world. What I’m trying to describe is a movement downward toward a treasure that we finally can’t get to, but as we get closer to that treasure, we move away from everything that’s familiar and comfortable. The insular Tahiti with which this passage ends, that I reject here, no insular Tahiti, is an adaption of a phrase from a different part of Melville’s novel in which Melville describes the Tahiti of the soul. A kind of perfect paradisical place. The place where 19th century whalemen like Melville himself used to desert when they got to the Pacific-realized that life on board a whale ship was extremely unpleasant and lots of hard work and not that much money.

But Tahiti was perfect. Tahiti was beautiful and warm. A kind of physical, spiritual and even sexual paradise. A kind of Club Med for 19th century whalemen. But as Melville knows, and as Shakespeare knows, that place, that landed beautiful garden space is very different from the waters that surround it. When Melville describes the insular Tahiti in Moby Dick he says, "you have to stay there because as soon as you push out on to the ocean, you lose it." What I’m going to try to do tonight in this talk, and what I’ve also tried to do, um, in a slightly larger form in the book, is to lay out something like an oceanic alternative to this insular Tahiti fantasy. I want to try to imagine how it would be to engage fully with an oceanic life. Acknowledging that human beings don’t, and can’t live on the ocean.

So in order to do this I’ll use some passages from Shakespeare, I’ll use some materials from the exhibition upstairs, and I’ll use a couple passages from my book, but I also want to point out at the beginning of the talk that this oceanic fantasy is not just a kind of academic exercise. It is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I mean in some ways I think that I’ve been thinking about this ever since I learned to swim as a child. But it’s also got a real new urgency for all of us this summer. Because of the hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And I won’t talk at any length tonight, although we could talk about it later if people want to, about the oil spill, except to say, just at the beginning, that the relationship that I’m trying to imagine here between human beings and the ocean, is the exact opposite of what’s happening at the bottom of BP’s version of the ocean right now. What I’m going to try to offer over the course of this talk tonight, is some essential features of the ocean as human beings can partially understand it. And I want to suggest that this isn’t actually as strange and academic as it might seem. I want to suggest that this is actually the way we encounter the ocean when we go to the beach on vacation. We just don’t always articulate it. And so on the one level I’m trying to bring together some historical literary material, and I’m also trying to capture the feeling that we each have when we stand on the beach and we look at the ocean and we have that little feeling of difference or slight dislocation, of being in the presence of the largest thing on the planet.

So, I’m going to try to outline three primary features of the ocean as it, as it appears in a poetic or historical sense. First of all that the ocean is opaque and it resists our seeing through it. Second of all, and this is a phrase that I get from Shakespeare, that the ocean is hungry, and third, that the ocean is transformative. It transforms itself and it transforms us. And so to try to make these points I’ve got a few slides that will go with each of these points, and we’ll start with the first one on the opaque ocean. There we go.

So this is a slide from the exhibition upstairs. Its two pages from the 17th century atlas made by the great Dutch cartographer, atlas maker and maker of globes; Willem Janszoon Blaeu. Blaeu is actually very well represented in the exhibition upstairs. He’s got two atlases and two globes and um.. several other sort of one page objects in the exhibition. And this page, like all the great 17th century atlases that were made in Europe at this time have a kind of common object which is to take mysterious space of the deep ocean and make it legible. Make it practical. What the mapping of the sea does, is it turns the unknown world of the Americas, the New World, into a space which can be comprehended from the point of view of a study in Amsterdam or London or wherever this map might have been opened. What I think is particularly interesting about this particular page in the Folger’s copy was taken out of a large atlas and then hand colored at a later date and then in the exhibition upstairs it’s in a frame.

What’s interesting about it, is that act, the moving of it out of the atlas context and then coloring it in, turns it into an aesthetic object. And I wanted to talk just a little bit about the features of the anesthetizing of the ocean hear. Because what this map represents is a way in which we turn the ocean from the space of mystery and dislocation into a place of aesthetic appreciation. And so I’ll start actually with the framing devices that go around the three upper sides of the map. On the top, and you guys probably can’t see this from where you’re sitting, but you’ll, you might be able to get some of the outlines of it. At the top is a kind of greatest hits or tourist attractions of the New World. Places like Rio and Cartahegna, and um, the Mexico City, the city of Mexico, and it provides, again from the point of view, if we think of this as being viewed in a scholar’s study, or more likely a merchant’s study. A wealthy merchant’s study in a European city, this shows you the places that your merchant vessels are going. This is the world that is newly available to the maritime, expanding maritime nations like; Holland and England in the 17th century. Along the two sides we have pictures of peoples. Different versions of Native American peoples. Greenlanders, Mexicans, Virginians, um, a whole host of different, slight variations on the dress and culture and customs of the various Native American pictures, uh peoples. A kind of amateur ethnography. What’s interesting about these, I think, is that we see how clearly the artist wants to classicize the Native American peoples. That all of them, despite their various forms of exotic dress look like Greek sculptures. And one of the things that we see happening here, and this is something that almost all the early European illustrators of the New World did, is in order to make the New World comprehensible to a European audience, they analogize it to the historical past. In this case to the Classical past of Greek sculpture.

What both of these gestures do is they turn the sea from a mysterious space to a relatively knowable or legible space. A place that can be appreciated and understood. If you look at the depiction of the oceans themselves, both the Atlantic and the Pacific, there’s also one other, I think, particularly telling future of this which marks just how far the 17th century atlas makers had gone in making the sea comprehensible. And that’s if we count up the figures, in these wide oceans that fill up the empty space, we have a series of ships and a series of sea monsters. Both of which are traditional decoration for maps going back hundreds of years. But if you count them up, we have eight ships, relatively large ships and three sea monsters. That seems like a, you know, that it’s starting to go our way if you will. Go the way of the human subject. There are not quite as many monsters in this as we might expect from earlier maps or from medieval maps as well. There’s a sense in this map that Blaeu and his cartographic allies feel, at least at this point, that they have the the at least these parts of the Americas relatively well understood. If you look closely at this map we see that the northern parts of North America are actually the least well understood. They’re much better about the Caribbean and about South America.

But this is a fantasy of looking at the surface of the ocean and feeling like despite its opacity we know what it means. But it also conceals some problems underneath the depths. And so when we turn to the second phase of the oceanic features that I’m outlining today, the hungry ocean we’re going to see something that’s a little bit less comfortable. Can I have the second slide. [Laughs] Yes, less comfortable. Particularly ….this poor guy whose got his foot in the shark’s mouth. Um, this is a manuscript drawing done by Edward Barlow, a 17th-century English soldier who also collected a wonderful huge manuscript journal which still survives at is in the Maritime Museum in London. This particular image is not in the show upstairs though reproductions of three other pages from Barlow’s journal are, so you might want to look at them if you have time afterwards. What I love about this image is its way, the way in which it captures the human experience of being in the ocean. The human experience, of course being extremely unfriendly and difficult, but even more than that, I think one of the things that’s fascinating about this image is it’s strangely impersonal. If we look at the man and we look at the shark, and you guys probably can’t read Barlow’s caption, but the caption actually describes just the shark, “the most ravenous fish that swims in the sea,” and the pilot fish on the bottom there that goes along with them. The caption doesn’t mention the human. In a weird way this is a impersonal, unemotional picture of violence underneath the waves. The sense that we have from Barlow’s image of being in the ocean, is that it’s an unfriendly place, a painful place, a destructive place, but not a place that cares very much about human feeling or human emotion. The hunger of this ocean is impersonal. And so I want to connect this to a moment in Shakespeare from which the phrase the “hungry ocean” comes. Which is the second quatrain of “Sonnet 64” in which Shakespeare is describing the action of the surf on the shore through, excuse me, the metaphor of hunger. But also, I think, providing a comparable image of the ocean as an impersonal or abstract force that doesn’t allow itself to be analogized to human emotion or human feeling. So Shakespeare writes in “Sonnet 64”; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain advantage on the kingdom of the shore and the firm soil win of the watery main increasing store with loss and loss with store.

The connection that I want to draw between this poem or this fragment of the poem and Barlow’s drawing is precisely this sense that the ocean is a place that doesn’t care very much about you and me. It doesn’t care very much about human bodies. It’s a place that we need to accommodate ourselves to because it won’t accommodate itself to us. There’s an emphasis, an emphasis in both the drawing and the poem on oceanic hunger and oceanic movement as impersonal voracious and also cyclical. I think in Shakespeare’s poem especially the kind of patterning of the language and the sense of the exchange between the shore and the ocean suggests that we can’t comprehend the ocean. We certainly can’t resist the hungry ocean’s gaining of advantage on the kingdom of the shore, but we can come to accommodate ourselves to, or to accept the movement that the ocean produces in our world. That’s a pretty tentative accommodation and it certainly isn’t going to do this poor guy much good. Um.. His foot or his leg is still going to be in relatively bad shape if he makes it out of this drawing at all. Um, and in fact I think that one of the things that both Shakespeare’s poem, and in a weird way, Barlow’s journal, or this particular moment in Barlow’s journal, doesn’t acknowledge, is just how much it hurts to be in the ocean. How threatening and painful it can feel to be in the situation that this man is in. So the second part of the hungry ocean is going to be a different image that gives us a much clearer vision of the emotional content and the feelings associated with, with immersion. And so, can I have the next slide.

This is a big beautiful oil painting done by Peter Paul Rubens around 1605 and 1606 when he was traveling in Italy. It’s the story of Hero and Leander. Leander is the hero, the man at the center here, whose lover Hero as you may remember in the story, Leander lives on one side of the Hellesponte, Hero lives on the other. He swims over at night to visit her until one night when he doesn’t make it across. What Rubens has done in this painting is collapse three different moments toward the climax of this story. The moment at the center where the young man has drowned and you see the kind of shocking pallor. It doesn’t come through on the reproduction, but the shocking deathly whiteness of the man’s skin. Um, indicating of course that he’s drowned. The second moment occurs when the Nereids, sea nymphs who surround the body, are wafting him over to shore to present the corpse to his desolate, um, desolate lover Hero. And then the third moment you can just barely make it out on the right hand corner of the, of the image, the grief-stricken Hero then throws herself into the sea to drown and to meet him in depth and in death. What this painting does, and I think this makes it an interesting supplement to Barlow’s image, is provide an image of just how insufficient the human ability to survive in the ocean is. It provides a direct encounter, a direct visceral and emotionally powerful encounter with the deathly potential of the sea.

With the threat that the sea poses to every swimmer, whether you’re in the Hellesponte in the Mediterranean, whether you’re on a beach vacation, or, you know, whether you’re at the pool on the weekend. Now this also connects to a slightly different passage in Shakespeare. Um, this is a speech from the end of Part 3 of Henry VI an early play in which Queen Margaret is reflecting on having lost the extended civil war in that play. And she analogizes the situation of having lost the war and being about to be, in her case banished, and in the case of other members of her party, put to death, to swimming. That swimming for Margaret is... always takes place under the shadow of drowning. That it always takes place knowing that you can’t swim forever. Excuse me. And so this is Margaret’s speech from the third part of Henry VI; “Say you can swim, alas ‘tis but awhile. Tread on the sand, why there you quickly sink. Bestride the rock, the tide will wash you off or else you famish and that’s a threefold death. This speak I Lords to let you understand that there is no hope for mercy more than with ruthless waves. With sand and rocks. Why courage then? What cannot be avoided to our childish weakness. To lament or fear.”

Margaret uses the ocean here to describe the situation of political failure and an absolutely merciless enemy, but the image that she uses is of the ocean as an inhuman and inhospitable world. It’s the ocean that Leander has found himself at the bottom of in Ruben’s painting. It’s a place in which no matter how young and powerful we might be, no matter what our political ambitions as in the case of Margaret, no matter what we want as human beings at a certain point we can no longer put off what cannot be avoided. This image of drowning, both in Margaret’s passage and in Rubens’s painting, is the ending which always sort of hovers alongside sea stories. Even if so many heroes of sea stories make it to shore, the experience of Leander, the experience that Margaret describes always shadows this kind of experience.

Alright, well that looks pretty bleak. Um, and I have to say that the first time that the first time I looked at this painting, um there’s one copy of it in the Yale art gallery in New Haven and then another in Germany, um, I was just shocked. I was searching for it and couldn’t believe how emotionally powerful it is just to look at that, at that dead body at the center. But I don’t think that we have to stay exclusively in this, in this kind of bleak and depressive point about the human encounter with the ocean. And which is why I’m going to turn now to the third and final of the three versions of the oceanic experience that I’m outlining tonight which is that the ocean is transformative. And I’m going to make this point in order to suggest ways in which the ocean can become a resource for our imaginative lives, as well as a um, as a cautionary threat. So can I have the next on?

O.K., This one, and actually the last two, both come from the exhibition upstairs. In this one the first one describes the public and historical experience of oceanic immersion as a way to create history. Providential history, and a way to understand the expansion of European culture into a watery world. This is the frontispiece to a book called A Token for Mariners, as you can see along the top there. And this is a book of maritime theology. Prayers and sermons that were designed especially for use on board at sea. One of the other ones contains a… this prayer you’re supposed to say when you’re worried about a tempest in fact. What this does in this image, and this is also the image we used for the cover of the brochure if anybody had a chance to grab a brochure on their way in or wants to grab one on the way out. Um, it provides a kind of three part view of the providential experience of the corporate human body, and particularly of the English nation going into a maritime world. The upper level provides the image of the eye of providence, the eye of God looking down and organizing the scene, seeing everything and knowing everything. The middle section is the ship itself beset by lightening from above and waves from below. It’s probably hard to see from where you guys are sitting, but there’s some broken masts and broken spars. The ship is looking like it’s in relatively bad shape. And then the third level the individual experience is the three castaway figures clinging to little bits of the wreckage on the bottom. And again it’s a little bit hard to see, but you can probably just about make out from where you are the middle figure who is sort of astride a piece of, a piece of wreckage there has, um, you know, little, I mean it’s not a terribly detailed image, but the eyes are looking directly at the viewer and it’s a very um, uh, it’s a sort of extraordinary appeal in that little tiny face. What these three things together combine, ah provide, is a vision of providential futurity which suggests that going to the ocean is dangerous and it’s deadly but there is a future that gets produced from it.

It’s a future that’s very partial, as the text on the bottom tells us this particular ship was from Dublin bound from Virginia and of the 26 souls on board, 7 were miraculously preserved. In other words there is a way through the ocean here if you happen to be part of the lucky 7 as opposed to the unlucky 19. And certainly for James Jennaway who put this book together, I think the proper response, the doctrinaire response is to think about, you know, the miraculous preservation of those 7, and about the plan which providence and God have for those 7 who will make it to Virginia. I think for us, if we look at this picture as a..from the point of view of the early 21st century and we think about the historical experience of European culture embarking on the great waters, um the eye and the organizing vision of providence becomes a little more complicated. As a Shakespearean I look at that eye and I think about Prospero and The Tempest who basically stands in for, impersonates if you will, the theological position of providence, controlling the storm and running the plot over the course of that play.

And then I also, and I remember talking with Carol [Brobeck] and Caryn [Lazzuri] about this when we were putting the show together. Whenever I look at this image, ah… it might be a legacy of too much time spent with fantasy novels as a young man, but, or watching movies with my kids, but I think of the eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings and I think about the kind of sinister sense of control that the eye can have. That’s a kind of resistant reading. But I do think that what this image in total presents for us is a fantasy about control, and I think in the 21st century we have some anxiety about fantasies of control that someone like Jannaway might have not either not had, or not wanted to admit to very much.

Part of the reason I think that in the contemporary culture that we’re a little bit anxious about these images of corporate or totalize in control, is because of the turn to the, ah, focus on individual experience, so this is the last slide which is a slide about, there we go, a slide about the individual experience of being at the bottom of someone’s ocean. This is an early modern diving bell, a relatively crude machine designed to put one person whose feet we can see but not his head, um, you know relatively far down to the bottom of the ocean, or the bottom of the sea. This is a 17th-century book of physical experiments made by a Scottish professor and mathematician. What I really like about this is it documents for us the desire to reach the bottom of the ocean in the 17th century. And it suggests that the thing which really is, which you really want, is to get there yourself. To experience it, to experience physically having your feet actually present on the bottom of the ocean, and to explain this I’m going to have to reach a little bit far…, a little bit forward in history from this time into the 18th century at which point the craze for swimming and the desire to go to the ocean, which we, I think, take as a relatively natural thing to do, particularly on a hot summer day. Although it may be a hot summer night with a rainstorm now.

Um, that the desire to go to the beach is more or less something that gets culturally invented in the 18th century, and it begins initially as a medical phenomenon. The idea is that the beach and the ocean, immersion in the ocean can cure your physical ailments. One famous literary example of character who seeks this out, although doesn’t actually get it, is the always complaining figure of Elizabeth Bennett’s mother in Pride and Prejudice who despite all her flutterings and palpitations says at one point in the novel that “a little sea bathing would set me up forever.” What she’s referring to there somewhat elliptically is something that a French physician name Dr. Hugh Maret elaborates much more explicitly in a book that he wrote about ocean bathing a little bit earlier than Pride and Prejudice. Maret writes that when a person goes into the ocean and actually puts their body underneath the water like this person, a prodigious upheaval occurs throughout the whole body. The soul, surprised by such an unexpected event startled from the fear of disunion from the body that it thinks is close at hand, lets the reins of government over the body, which it presides, drop. So to speak. What Maret describes there is a fantasy about the ocean as a place of freedom, a place of the physical feeling of liberation. And it’s the physical feeling of liberation that is caused by the opacity and hostility of the ocean. It’s caused by the fear of death which shadows the moment of immersion.

Especially, this is in the 18th century, very often the people who were going swimming or who were hurled into the water by their doctors were not trained to swim, so they’re relying upon a much more shocking sense of the ocean than we have perhaps when we’re a little bit better equipped to take care of ourselves in the ocean. What Maret describes though, and I think that this image and many of the other image in “Lost at Sea,” as a kind of prehistory to it. Is a sense that the ocean can transform us physically and individually if we will go to it. That bodies feel differently when they go into salt water. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was swimming in Long Island Sound, that there is a constant sense of difference whenever you go into the ocean. And that because of that difference the ocean, the underneath space, the underwater space in the ocean is a place that we will always want to go even if we quite… can’t quite get there.

And so the last thing that I want to talk about today is some ideas about why it is in the contemporary world we might want to get there. What might we get out of embracing this desire to be in the oceanic space. We have much better diving bells than this one made by George Sinclair. We have all sorts of technologies that’ll get us into the ocean, and keep us there for slightly longer than we ordinarily could stay. And so the last passage that I’m going to read for you guys is a slightly compressed version of the call to arms with which I end my book. Which is thinking about how the ocean can provide us with an ecological model that will help us make sense of contemporary experience. Um, so the last little mini chapter in the book is called Toward a Blue Cultural Studies and I’ll try to explain a little bit what that means here and I’m going to give us just three separate little pieces of it. One that’s about the Gulf Stream, one that’s about poetry and one that’s about the ocean itself.

So, the first part. From a certain point of view, the dominant actor in Anglo-American history for the past several thousand years has been the Gulf Stream. This torrid river of hot water in the sea, heats on one end the British Isles to a fairly comfortable temperature and making it possible to live and grow crops in that northern… rocky northern island. And on the other end, the southern head of the great Gulf Stream steams out of the Caribbean through the channel between Cuba and Florida and up the east coast of North America. The Gulf Stream’s nutrient rich waters were one of the primary contributors to the growth of the great massive biomass of North American codfish up in the North Atlantic on the Great Grand Banks, which for over a millennium fed North American peoples on both sides of the Atlantic massive amounts of protein before being exhausted by factory trawlers at the end of the 20th century. The Gulf Stream current comprises an important part of the North Atlantic Gyre which is a clock wise rotating marine highway consisting of prevailing winds and current that crosses the Atlantic from southwestern Europe and northwestern Africa across into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico back out up the east coast of North America and then across to Europe again. Early European expansion into the Caribbean and the Americas simply followed these oceanic pathways, at least until sail technology changed a little bit in the 18th century. Living on land we sometimes forget how much the sea’s physical structures control our physical and cultural histories. We should remember.

Second part. It’s true that poetry can’t keep oil out of the Gulf, or protect low lying cities from tropical storms, but it’s also true that language is one of the basic tools that our culture uses to grapple with our unstable ocean drenched environment. Shifting away from the supposed stability of land will cause us to abandon certain kinds of happy fictions and replace them with less comforting narratives. Fewer insular Tahitis and more shipwrecks. But, and this is really my key point, both in the talk tonight and the exhibition outside, and also in the book. We already have these narratives. We just don’t always put them at the center which is where they belong. The trick going forward will be to replace the tragic narrative of humanities failed attempts to control nature with less epic, more improvisational stories about working with an intermittently hostile natural world. We need stories about sailors and swimmers and divers to supplement our over-supply of warriors and emperors. These stories are already there, Odysseus swims to shore from his wrecked ship, Ishmael survives the destruction of the Pequod, Robinson Crusoe thrives on his island home. In Shakespeare Marina, Ferdinand, and Viola all survive immersion even if Othello, Timon and Lear do not. These are stories we can use.

Part Three. When we look for the sea we see it. It’s always there. We may not understand the waters, but we know where to find them. The sea’s overwhelming presence in our physical and imaginative worlds gives us reasons to reread Shakespeare and Anglo-American history with salt in our eyes. Think about how our fears of flood spill into semi-opaque affirmations and transformations. Because these stories unfold the rich and strange history of our imagined relationship with the biggest thing on the planet, Shakespeare’s ocean and the oceans in Lost at Sea are shifting symbols whose meanings are never exhausted their unreachable bottoms conceal treasure and promised death. Reading Shakespeare for the sea thus launches the vast and slightly quixotic project that I call Blue Cultural Studies. A way of looking at our own terrestrial culture from an offshore perspective. As if we could align ourselves with the watery element. What we will find is a painful and joyful history of coming to terms with a world of flux. Shakespeare and Lost at Sea ask us to read as if poetic narratives and the poetical imagination can help us embrace and endure ocean driven disorder. Whether we can always imitate Shakespeare’s shipwreck survivors or Melville’s whalemen or Robinson Crusoe isn’t certain, but as our world goes bluer and less orderly, these stories have something that we need. And then just in conclusion just to connect this even more explicitly to our current experience of ecological crisis, blue cultural studies asks us to use the ocean to help us imagine a way of living inside a crisis moment with joy pleasure and utopian vision. It asks us to focus less on the accounting of things like sustainability or even growth than on a mobile engagement with a constantly changing and unstable world and it also makes an explicit argument for the value of literature and the humanities for understanding how we should live in an era of ecological crisis. Thank you.