I’d been seeing my therapist for more than a year by the time I brought this phobia up, and I could detect in her reaction some surprise that it had taken me so long to turn my attention to something so obviously ripe for the picking, so dense with analytic possibility. I had long thought of my moth phobia as an essentially comic neurosis, as a strange but basically minor personality quirk whose mysteriousness constituted a kind of psychological parlor game. (What could it mean? Where did it come from? Why moths?) But what I found as soon as I began to speak about it, there in her office, was that I wasn’t finding it very amusing at all. I was finding it strangely difficult to talk about, as though I were suddenly on the precipice of some vertiginous chasm of significance. I was aware of a tension in my stomach, a tightness around something mutable and volatile.
We returned to the subject of moths repeatedly over a period of a few weeks, and it gradually emerged that this creature, this malevolently charged object, was linked via certain key associations to a general nexus of anxiety. I’d been talking about how I hadn’t been sleeping all that well, about how I felt my sleep was more fragile than I’d like it to be.
“Fragile,” she said. “I’ve noticed that this is a word you use quite a lot. What comes to mind for you when you say this word?”
I said nothing for what seemed a very long time, attended to a couple of seagulls screeching at each other, the desolate staccato of a can being punted along the street by a gust of wind.
“Do you really want to know?” I said, straightening myself up on the couch.
“Of course I really want to know,” she said, smiling.
“Death,” I said. I was smiling back, but I was surprised to hear myself say it, and strangely chastened. I was feeling the same unease, the same tightness, that I had felt when I spoke about my moth phobia. “What I think about when I say the word fragile is death. The fragility of life. And the unpredictability of the future. It’s the same thing. And I think this terror that I have of moths is also a terror of that fragility and unpredictability. Because they are so unpredictable. They are completely chaotic in their movements, and chaotic in their effects. I feel like my fear of moths must be some version of my fear of the future.”
She took some slow and deep breaths, which I knew was her manner of encouraging me to do the same. We said nothing for a long time. Seagulls. Scraping can. Passing tram.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
We were out of time.
* * *
—
We were camping at Alladale, yes, but camping was by no means the sum total of what we were up to. What we were up to, as my wife had semi-ironically put it to me before I left for Scotland, was camping about the apocalypse. We were sitting around, cross-legged on riverbanks and reclined in clusters against grassy slopes, talking about the bad times we were in, the troubled days. What did we talk about? And who, in fact, were we, who were doing the talking?
We were a heterogeneous group: a handful of writers and artists; a recently retired business improvement district manager for a small town in Cornwall with an abiding interest in shamanism and other esoteric practices; a solicitor; a Jungian analyst from Switzerland; a couple of ecologists; a dance instructor from Edinburgh.
“We are going through a great period of narrative breakdown,” said Paul Kingsnorth one afternoon. We were sitting in the lodge house around which we’d pitched our tents, apparently one of the most remote buildings in all of Europe—a forty-five-minute SUV drive across nauseatingly bumpy terrain from the perimeter of the wilderness reserve itself. There was a wood fire crackling and hissing in the hearth, and it was deathly quiet out in the darkening valley, and we were, all sixteen of us, in various attitudes of repose on the couches and chairs and on the floor.
Years back, in a previous life as a journalist in London, Paul had been deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine. His old boss, he said, had suffered a nervous breakdown on the job, because the news was all so relentless and unthinkable. Everything was another river drying up, another species disappearing from the Earth.
“There is,” he said, “a growing sense of panic and confusion. The stories that we believed aren’t true anymore, but we don’t know what’s true instead.” There was, in his manner, a kind of quiet excitement. This moment of painful chaos presented an opportunity to find new stories, new ways of living. It was clear that Paul had come to relish the disruptions of our time, took a kind of perverse satisfaction in the overturning of old orders.
Another Englishman, the former business improvement district manager—whose name was Neil, and who spoke and carried himself in a slow and priestly manner that I found unaccountably touching—spoke in his turn. He said: “There is something about this place that unsettles me very deeply. This is a postapocalyptic landscape. It’s a site of total ecological collapse.”
Among the group, this sentiment was met with general agreement. It was a beautiful place, but its beauty was cold and unyielding, and largely empty of animal life.
“It is,” said Paul. “We’re on the edge of civilization out here, in a place that’s been stripped bare of life by civilization. That’s part of the reason we chose it.”
By “we” he meant he and Andres Roberts, the wilderness guide with whom he’d arranged this retreat. Andres was yang to Paul’s yin: a cheerful man with a soft Liverpool accent and a quiet but potent charisma, and an uncanny knack of shaping and focusing the group’s energy by subtle modulations of his own manner—a shift in posture, a mischievous grin, a bowing of the head, gentle and solemn.
“In a way,” said Paul, “this place is a Ground Zero of the industrial age. All the trees in these hills were cut down to provide fuel for industry, to build ships for colonial expansion. An entire attitude toward nature and toward the world spread outward from this place we’re in, these islands.”
Someone else brought up the Great Oxygenation Event, which had happened about two and a half billion years ago, a mass extinction from which all subsequent life on Earth had evolved. Back then, the world was populated exclusively by single-cell organisms, which lived beneath the surface of oceans that were bloodred due to the massive levels of iron in the water. These microbes relied exclusively on anaerobic methods of respiration—until one species, the cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, began to use the Sun’s light to generate vastly more energy than its anaerobic colleagues, by which method it thrived and increased its numbers exponentially, creating via the disruptive innovation of photosynthesis an exploding surplus of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, toxic to almost every other living thing on Earth. This one rogue microbe changed the atmospheric constitution of the Earth, causing the obliteration of most existing life on the planet and preparing the way for the evolution of multicellular organisms such as ourselves.