In the mean time between failures

To Ottolenghi in Islington last night to meet neighbour Inge Cordsen before seeing the revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Almeida Theatre.

Islington is an easy 20-minute ride away but the Overground would let us return home together. However, just before I reached Hampstead Heath station a problem was discovered with the track to the west. Train services were delayed, were delayed, were delayed, were suspended.

Ten minutes before I was due in N1, I raced up out of the station and over to Belsize Park Underground – to find a crowd of travellers out on the street. Severe delays on the entire Northern Line.

Back home. Jump on the bike, over to Islington.

Others have reviewed how Look Back in Anger has both dated – the misogyny, the anger at elites – and become alarmingly timely – the misogyny, the anger at elites.

Mismanagement and grief
We must suffer them all again
— W.H. Auden

I’m decades older than when I last saw it: it was like a fresh play. The best insight was how Jimmy Porter rages against everyone and could only, eventually, be consoled by a character he saw as sharing his suffering. Inge and I talked of narcissists we have known – and one I lost as a friend when he could neither control nor apologise for his ‘angergasms’.

A hard-won knowledge of what wears us down
— Geoffrey Hill

In The Long Descent, John Michael Greer offers a model of how a civilisation ends. A civilisation is surplus production spent on infrastructure: physical, social, and systemic. Infrastructure accumulates and the maintenance bill rises. Eventually the civilisation exhausts the resources it can reach; surplus production no longer meets the maintenance bills, and things begin to fail the way a business fails: first slowly, then suddenly.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
— W.B. Yeats

Unable to maintain the comfort of the empire, the elites protect their own. The growing losses fall on those least able to protect themselves, people drop off the ladder, and the majority consent on which elites rely for control crumbles away. Enter the demagogues.

The windiest militant trash
Important people spout
— W.H. Auden

Maintenance bills on public infrastructure are cut deeper and deeper to protect the comfort of the wealthy who don’t use it. Money not paid in taxes to mend the road buys Range Rovers to float over pot holes. Breakdowns in the public realm become more and more frequent.

We are living in the mean time between failures.

There’s a reason, Tyson Yunkaporta tells us, why the ruins of civilisations are found in deserts.

Practical recommendations in the event of a catastrophe

It usually begins innocently enough with an acceleration, unnoticeable at first, in the turning of the earth. Leave home at once and do not bring along any of your family. Take a few indispensable things. Place yourself as far as possible from the centre, near the forests the seas or the mountains, before the whirling motion as it gets stronger from minute to minute begins to pour in towards the middle, suffocating in ghettoes, closets, basements. Hang on forcefully to the outer circumference. Keep your head down. Have your two hands constantly free. Take good care of the muscles of your legs.

— Zbigniew Herbert