MILTON IN THE ANTHROPOCENE By Ed Simon *** The Montréal Review, October 2024 |
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Only a few short decades after the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlan, the rubble of her limestone and adobe bricks which once constituted the foundations of temples to Xitle and Quetzalcoatl repurposed by the conquerors in the erection of their Metropolitan Cathedral, the triumphant Aztec capital of broad, cactus lined boulevards and massive pyramids, intimidating ball courts and sumptuous canals of blue glinting in the hot Mexican sun, was as if a desert mirage, a chimera, an illusion. The Spanish conquistadors, the very men who through guile and strategy, luck and spirochete, had destroyed this city which was larger than Paris, Cordoba, and Venice, and five times the size of London, looked back a generation hence at their rapaciousness and remembered Tenochtitlan with a strange sort of amazement that at times almost sounded like regret – like guilt. The Spanish conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo reflected upon his own role in the demolishment of the world’s most incredible city in that distant year of 1521, describing the porticos, pyramids, and temples of the Aztecs as an “enchanted vision,” composed of “things never seen, heard of, or even dreamed of before,” while confessing that it was the actions of men exactly like him – particularly that Luciferian invader Hernan Cortez who led the Spanish in their assault on Tenochtitlan – who were the reason why “now all is overthrown and lost; nothing is left standing.” Bringing with them the Inquisition, the Spanish inaugurated auto de fes of both books and people. A holocaust of manuscripts – the obliteration of an ancient philosophy that had been rendered in the beautiful glyphs of Nahuatl, where word and image were almost identical, now used as kindling in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral, the priests, poets, and prophets of the Aztecs joining their sacred texts upon the pyre. Once a metropolis of wide, rectilinear streets designed with geometric precision in the midst of an island whose lake was surrounded by snow-capped mountains – a capital of beans and squash, amaranth and chili peppers, of resplendent Mexican prickly poppy, California poppy, sunflowers, dahlia, gladiolus, pineapple sage, marigold, and more than anything poinsettias – Tenochtitlan had become the provincial capital of New Spain, and from the conquered Aztecs, and later the defeated Incas, gold would flow into the coffers of the Hapsburgs in distant Toledo. “Beautifully sing here,” wrote the Aztec poet Nezahualcoyotl, describing Tenochtitlan in a Nahuatl manuscript known as the Florentine Codex, “the turquoise bird, the quetzal, the trogon:/the macaw’s song presides,” but this was a paradise lost, a condition which all of you reading exist within. Today in the aftermath of that fall, the geological epochs themselves are measured by humanity’s influence on nature, for it was at the 2000 meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program held in Cuerevaca, Mexico – less than ninety miles from the site of Tenochtitlan and the former capital of the Olmecs – where the Dutch Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen stood up and declared “We are no longer in the Holocene, we are in the Anthropocene.” Scientists have debated what event marks this transition to the Anthropocene, whether the first nuclear explosion in New Mexico or the first oil well drilled in Pennsylvania, the nuclear age or the Industrial Revolution, but there is a broad agreement that regardless of the when, they why the disastrous sovereignty of humanity over nature. Let me suggest that the first glimmerings of the Anthropocene began with the destruction of Tenochtitlan, and ours has been a postlapsarian world ever since. There were those among the conquistadors who understood that a fall had occurred, who could comprehend what colonialism had wrought upon the Aztecs, as the ambivalence in del Castillo’s memories evidences. Far more damning in his appraisal than del Castillo was the reformed soldier and Dominican friar Bartolomeo de las Casas. Missionary among the Aztecs and the Maya, de las Casas was privy to the barbarity of the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, noting that despite the protestations that imperial conquest was intended to spread the faith, such violence and slavery was the result of “insatiable greed and ambition.” De las Casas’ 1561 A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies was an apocalyptic epic derived from his own experiences, the tale of a complex and foreign civilization destroyed by the avarice and cruelty of hypocritical Christians. This was the tale of an Eden to which the demonic Europeans had traveled across Chaos to reach, first tempting the ruler Montezuma by an appeal to his own vanity, and then rupturing creation itself after this destruction in the Court of the Jaguar King. “We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed,” wrote de las Casas, “there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifty million.” During the Renaissance, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies was instrumental in the propagation of the “Black Legend,” the rhetoric which claimed that Spanish colonialism was uniquely cruel, and where despite de las Casas’ own benevolent purposes, his words were often put to the use of justifying the imperial ambitions of other European powers, namely the (just as cruel) English. His book was florid, a litany of mutilations and massacres, tortures and rapes, all of it permeated with the sense that there was a fallenness after Cortez’ entry into Tenochtitlan, that the destruction of this past world had resulted in an immeasurably more vice-filled and sin-drenched modernity. Horrors were enumerated by de las Casas, infant-heads dashed upon the rocks and mothers raped to death, men split in half by rapiers and conquistadors bedecked in garlands of human hands, human ears. According to de las Casas, paradise had become pandemonium, writing in his 1548 In Defense of the Indians that the destruction of Tenochtitlan had rendered the Spaniard a “despotic master, not a Christian; a son of Satan, not of God; a plunderer, not a shepherd.” For men like de las Casas, this narrative was marked by the claim of the conquistador Francisco Lopez de Gomara who said that the discovery of the New World was the most significant event in the history of the cosmos, rivaled only by Creation and the Crucifixion. In some ways it was a combination of both, a reenactment of that first Fall, except rather than between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates it now occurred along the cacti-flowered, prickly-peared shores of Lake Texcoco – the very hinge upon which all subsequent history would be set. Despite its presence in the English cultural imagination, de las Casas’ work would not be translated until a century later, when a government functionary named John Phillips rendered it into a bloody idiom in 1656. Fluent in Spanish, Phillips had learned that tongue and others from his polyglot uncle, a poet and pamphleteer of some renown though still a decade away from completing his greatest epic masterpiece, for whom the basic tale recounted in A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies of a paradise lost would be familiar. His name was John Milton. Milton was a shadow creature, a liminal figure who was the last of the Renaissance men while being the first of the moderns. Long before Paradise Lost was written, the world had already reinvented itself several times. In some ways, this epic poem which best describes modernity at its beginnings was written nearly two centuries after the genesis of that modernity. By the time that Milton had promised to accomplish “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” to “justify the ways of God to man,” the Copernican model of the solar system was nearly two centuries old, as was the discovery of the Americas, and the Protestant Reformation. Conventionally, modernity manifested in an unsettling of humanity’s traditional primacy; a shift in our centrality that affected understandings geographical, cosmological, and theological, so that Paradise Lost with its themes of mournful ambiguity could have only been written as a modern work. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” claimed Walter Benjamin in a 1929 essay. Certainly, the first contention is true of Paradise Lost, possibly the second one as well. That is because within English literature, as affected and archaic as the language of Paradise Lost may sound, Milton’s epic is as a window through which thinking passes from the antique into the contemporary; it is the hinge through which modernity emerges, or even more accurately, where it is first named. Genre and epoch are united in the form of Milton’s poem, which is why it both obliterated the possibility of future epic, but also established modern English literature, where the ciphers of allegory would give way to the complexity of the novel. If modernity began with the Columbian exchange, with the suturing together of the world’s long disconnected hemispheres as European powers burnt a path of conquest across the Americas, then the fullest literary expression of that modernity in English would not be well until the seventeenth-century, not in the form of Phillip’s translation of A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies, but in his uncle’s epic poem. Describing Eden in book four of the epic, Milton might as well be drawing directly from those travelogues enumerating the delights of the Occident, for “in this please soil… out of the fertile ground he causes to grow/All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;/High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit/Of vegetable gold… Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm,/Others whose fruit burnished with golden rind/Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,/If true, here only, and of delicious taste,” those “Hesperian fables” configuring Eden as a sort of truer and greater America. By the time his nephew had translated de las Casas, and despite it still being a decade before the publication of his most famous work, Milton was already a well-regarded poet and pamphleteer, a political thinker as much as a literary one who was enmeshed in the affairs of state as the shaky Puritan-led Republic emerged from the tumult of civil war and revolution. Though he had already composed immaculate Latin and English verse such as “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629), “On Shakespeare” (1630), “L’ Allegro” (1632), the performed masque Comus (1634), and the astounding “Lycidas” (1637) – Milton’s most widely read works were his political pamphlets, where among other subjects he opined on issues of episcopacy, censorship, divorce, and regicide. Deeply implicated with the various and often divergent factions of the anti-monarchists during the civil wars, Milton always adhered to the most radical positions for the time, ones which often seem startlingly contemporary, as in his vociferous defense of free speech entitled Areopagitica (1644), wherein he argued that “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” Born to a middle-class composer in 1608, some five years before William Shakespeare would retire, Milton was the beneficiary of a humanist education, well-versed in the Latin and Greek classics, and as an adult an astounding polyglot with supposedly knowledge of over a dozen languages, a talent which would serve him well in his later vocation as the state’s Secretary of Foreign Tongues, effectively the Interregnum government’s chief diplomat to the continent. From a steadfast Protestant family, Milton would have dalliances with a variety of austere Reformation theologies from Presbyterianism to Puritanism, none of which hampered his own curiosity for Renaissance learning. Educated at Cambridge, the poet would undertake a grand tour of France and Italy starting in 1638, where he both supped with the Jesuits, and made pilgrimage to the astronomer Galileo’s villa under house arrest by the Inquisition. When Milton returned to England, it was to a nation undergoing revolutionary convulsions, the contradictions between the Puritan-dominated Parliament and the increasingly High Church monarchy eventually erupting into war. This wasn’t an ivory tower intellectual, despite his work being so concerned with theological issues that appear rarefied to us today, but an engaged thinker of action as well, for as Anna Beer writes in Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot, “Eloquent theorist though he was, Milton never remained merely in the realm of abstraction,” for whether “government servant or political prisoner, advocate of religious freedom or critic of monarchy, Milton learnt, because he had to learn, how to deal with censorship and intolerance, how to make his voice heard in the clamorous debates of the day.” In the context of England and its civil war, that meant absorbing debates about theological issues which are today largely obscure to secular readers, questions about ritual and observance, agency, and providence, works and faith. Yet Milton has endured for three-and-a-half-centuries because his work was capable of absorbing and translating a far-larger paradigm shift than just those related to that which we recognize as religion, for Paradise Lost also deals with the momentous changes occurring over the two centuries before the poem’s composition and continuing in the centuries afterward. Far larger and more all-encompassing than merely allegorizing English political and ecclesiastical issues of the seventeenth-century, Paradise Lost deals with the scientific, the geographic, the theological, the economic revolutions of the early modern period; it dramatizes the feeling of being alive as one system emerges and another fades away. Opening in media res with Lucifer and the fallen angels’ expulsion, their establishment of the sulphureous parliament Pandemonium within the entrails of Hell, and then Satan’s journey through Chaos towards the garden where he will tempt the first couple into that divine betrayal that necessitates the Fall, Paradise Lost was intended by its author as nothing less than a massive theological justification for why the world is the way that it is, from the existence of sin to the vagaries of freedom. Where Homer had sung of the “rage of Achilles” and Virgil of “Arms and the man… forced by fate,” Milton’s great denouement was neither obliteration in Troy or the founding of Rome, but rather simply the eating of an apple, yet the consequence of that was the breaking of the very universe. A Christian intent to be sure, though Milton’s distaste for orthodoxy could border on the heretical. Beyond the vagaries of basic religious apologetics, Paradise Lost was intended to be a portrait of the cosmos itself, and humanity’s fractured place within that broken universe. He said everything that needed to be said about it. After Paradise Lost, it is impossible to write an epic in English. Most English-language epics which aspire to the conventions of the form – the invocation of a muse, the division of thousands of stanzas of verse into several “books,” the unspooling serpentine sentences in all their rhetorically baroque opulence – are for the most part affectations or interesting exercises, but for the most part moribund. Milton had promised, and then most importantly delivered, a cosmic explanation “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world, and all our woe,” so that now it was simply no longer tenable to pretend that writing any sort of epic commensurate with that poem’s scope and genius was possible. Poems such as the diplomat Joel Barlow’s 1807 epic about America’s discovery entitled The Columbiad or Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War epic John Brown’s Body are, despite some moments of genuine beauty, largely historical curiosities. There are, to be sure, more eccentric epic poems in English written since the seventeenth-century which have moments of greatness, though the most brilliant of these – Walt Whitman’s 1855 “Song of Myself,” Ezra Pound’s 1925 The Cantos, Derek Walcott’s 1990 Omeros, and of course William Blake’s 1810 Milton which takes the master himself as the main subject – are unconventional to the point were classifying them as epics-proper becomes difficult. To compose an epic after the blind bard Milton had already invoked the astral muse Urania, and then wrote perfect blank verse in his mind during the evening to be transcribed by an amanuensis upon the break of dawn, is no longer an option. The muse had depleted her faculties through the wondrous miracle of Paradise Lost itself, and besides, to even countenance such a conceit as a “muse” in contemporary poetry would seem at best precious and at worst insane. Before Milton there were, of course, a variety of attempts, most notably Edmund Spenser’s turgid-if-with-moments-of-brilliance The Faerie Queene, first printed in 1590. The Faerie Queene is, to be sure, a canonical work that has endured in the manner that it has for a reason; reading Spenser’s fantastical allegory with its virginal monarch Gloriana and the brave Red Cross Knight, chaste Britomart and noble Arthur of Camelot, and its obvious why Milton loved this work, and wished to surpass it – which he did, handily. Spenser writes about symbols, but Milton writes about people, or at least recognizable personalities, none so much as his great triumph of Lucifer, the fallen angel who waged the war in Heaven. “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n,” declares Lucifer, and whether that’s Milton’s own contention obviously depends on whether he was of the Devil’s party, regardless of if he knew it. Certainly, it is a modern contention, the solipsism that maintains the mind itself can reframe reality for its own purposes, so that if Paradise Lost did dissolve the possibility of epic, then it also additionally accomplished Benjamin’s other criteria for great literature – it established a new genre, or more accurately it was among the first poems to truly express modernity, to encompass the Anthropocene as it began to unfold. What Paradise Lost accomplished is the deliverance of future prophecy in the language of the passing world. Surveying the changed cosmos of his age, Milton delivered a summation of what cankered modernity – in all its skepticisms and uncertainties, but also all its promises and wonders – actually felt like. “Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon,” writes Milton in the poem’s final stanza, describing the exile of the first couple. “The world was all before them… They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow/Through Eden took their solitary way.” A moving conclusion to a work by a man often slandered as an unfeeling Puritan, Eve, and Adam’s travails our meant to be understood as our own – all of us – in our disorders, our dislocations, our disorganizations. Far more important than the scene’s immediate religious context is the universalism of Even and Adam’s alienation, because in those last lines of Paradise Lost, they are not just the primordial couple in exile from Eden as enumerated in a Bronze Age creation myth, but they are also the scientist at the cusp of the Renaissance learning that we’re no longer at the center of the universe, they’re the priest at the dawn of the Reformation doubting that the Church has a monopoly on the truth, they’re the guilty conquistador who remembers the glories of Tenochtitlan a generation after its destruction. Examining the years between 1490 and 1530 – a period ending thirteen decades before Milton began his poem – the historian Patrick Wyman writes in The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World that in “this brief span, less than a single person’s lifetime” the intellectual edifice of Europe and Christendom had undergone “a series of convulsive transformations.” This was a metamorphosis on all fronts; for many a traumatic exile from Church, the world, the universe, Heaven. Paradise Lost was the delayed grappling with that exile, converted into the tale of humanity’s (ultimately fortunate) fall. That poetry still speaks to us – maybe even more than it did in the past, if we’re willing to listen – because Eve and Adam are also us, daily watching the toll which the Anthropocene takes, the rising temperatures, the mass extinctions, the threat to humanity’s very survival. Paradise Lost, both in its narrative and its composition, is epitaph for the Medieval and Renaissance worlds and encomium for the coming modern. As tenuous as the connections to the New World might seem in the writing of Milton’s epic, the age of exploration in the Western Hemisphere is explicitly tied to the theme of the poem, but also the sense of dislocations which those journeys to the Americas had engendered in Christendom. Suddenly the globe was twice as large as had been assumed; suddenly the Trinitarian division of three continents which had been presumed was made obsolete by navigators espying two massive new landmasses on their way towards Asia. “Paradise Lost might well be described as a palimpsest containing an ancient biblical text with, superimposed on it, a modern colonial narrative written in the spaces between the biblical words,” argues J. Martin Evans in Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism. This is the Milton indebted to his nephew and the latter’s translation of de las Casas, the poet who could see both Paradise and Pandemonium in Tenochtitlan, and Lucifer in both Cortez and Montezuma. Most importantly, this was a Milton who understood that the ongoing “discoveries” in the New World not only inaugurated colonialism, but ensured that our understanding of reality itself would forever be different. To exist before the Columbian Exchange was to be resident of a paradigm where everything was neatly circumscribed by a certain divine providence, but the surprise of the New World was such that all previous truths were to be doubted; a skepticism intrinsic to the experience of modernity (and something which neatly feels as if being caste out of Eden itself). Such was an exile of the mind as much as of matter, for the intellectual chaos of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries was reflected in every field – scientific, philosophical, and theological. There is a reason why Columbus’ slipper first pressing into warm, Caribbean white sand is separated by only twenty-five years from Luther hammering nail into hard German wood. The exilic sense that Paradise Lost expresses and embodies is replete through every domain of knowledge during this period. Notably Paradise Lost is a consummately cosmological epic, from the muse to whom Milton ascribed inspiration being Urania – commonly associated with astronomy – to the only contemporary figure who is mentioned being that “Tuscan artist” of Galileo, whom “As when by night the glass… observes imagined lands and regions in the moon.” Something so potent in that choice of phrasing – “imagined lands.” Less an announcement of relativism or anti-empiricism, for what the poet comprehends is how much of these shifts, how many of these alterations in understanding had a profound affect on identity, on consciousness. To be modern is to be in exile from not just yourself, but from a reality always in flux; where doubt is much more central than faith. Milton’s epic tall of paradise disrupted and innocence lost is about many different things – a cosmic retelling of the barebones narrative of Genesis’ creation myth, a consideration of the ways in which original sin is implicit in human nature, and the most arresting literary treatment of evil in the form of the character Lucifer ever rendered on the printed page – but it’s also the first, last, and only canonical epic expression of the experience of specifically modernity at the dawn of our epoch, that sense which Marx would describe two centuries later as feeling as if “All that is solid melts into air,” the sensation of the air rushing past you as you’re caste out of heaven. Yet in a manner different from the feeling of dislocation, maybe one that’s far more important, modernity also signaled the exact opposite, the way in which humanity had acquired powers to reshape the very planet, where that Luciferian desire for self-creation meant that time and space itself would now be measured by our rapacious appetites. “The mind is its own place,” argues Lucifer in the poem’s most famous line, “and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” An axiom of the rugged individualist, the bootstrapper, and the narcissistic solipsist all at the same time; a principle attuned towards those supply-side libertarian adherents of manifest destiny and believers in humanity’ inexorable right to Eden, but one which ignores that even if the mind is its own place, the material world is very much its own place as well. One far larger than us, and bound to absorb only so many alterations from those of us who exist through its generosity, seduced into believing we have dominion over the earth until Armageddon intercedes. A fall, indeed. In 1678, four years after Milton had divided his original 1667 ten-book edition of Paradise Lost into the far more canonical twelve-books of his 1674 edition, a rather different innovation would be promulgated a few hundred miles north in the West Midlands town of Dudley. There the metallurgist Clement Clerke perfected early models of the reverberatory furnace, a variety of carefully maintained super-heated ceramic cupola capable of smelting unusually pure iron, lead, and copper. Despite Clerke being a rather incompetent entrepreneur, the Dudley forge was the first spark from the hammer of industry against the anvil of the English nation, the shift from the agricultural to the industrial beginning alongside the gentle tinkling of the Worcestershire Stour. Soon the English countryside would reverberate with the cacophony of what Blake called those “dark Satanic mills,” for as with prophetic urgency Milton had described the forges operated in Hell by the demon Mulciber, factories whose “griesely top/Belch’d fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire/Shon with glossie scurff, undoubted sign/That in his womb was hid metallic Ore, /The work of Sulphur.” What made the Industrial Revolution possible, and the subsequent wealth accumulated by the richest beneficiaries of that economic and technological order, was the mining of fossil fuels, those capitalists having "Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands/Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth," as Milton wrote, having "Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound." Technically Paradise Lost was written before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, but only just. This was the ultimate fruition of the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, the New Science – of the Anthropocene. Now humanity had acquired for itself those Faustian prerogatives that had previously been the purview only of the gods. If understanding had rapidly changed before, the Industrial Revolution, and all its ancillary children from the nuclear age to digital technology, meant that reality itself had shifted. Or at least, like the Devil pretending that Hell is Heaven, we have convinced ourselves of this, but material reality has a way of collecting its due. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change released in 2018, authored by 91 scientists from forty countries and based in six-thousand peer-reviewed studies, if we continue to release greenhouses gases – primarily carbon dioxide, but also methane – at the current rate, we can expect an average increase in temperature by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2040. As the authors wrote, this faster-than-expected warming implies a century dominated by “inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty,” while concluding that we only had until 2030 to reverse the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change. Speaking in superlatives rarely accessible to sober and judicious scientists, the authors somberly claimed that the effects of climate change would result in catastrophes with “no documented historic precedent,” a disturbing conclusion for anyone even barely familiar with the archive of barbarity and cruelty which constitutes our historical record. Such is our current moment, the apotheosis of modernity, when our own hungers finally inculcate mass suicide. Individualism and totalitarianism, twin-sides of the same heresy, would become the angels of the Anthropocene, whereby the central ethic is Lucifer’s embrace of “th’ unconquerable will… And courage never to submit or yield.” This is the ethic of the corporate officer unconcerned with environmental degradation and the politicians who empower them, of the rapacious consumers who value comfort above all else and the citizens who consistently vote against their own interest. What is clear is that the epoch of modernity which began a half-millennium ago is now ending; what we face is either a radically reordering of how we understand our relationship to the planet and each other, or pandemonium. “The old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born,” wrote the Italian philosopher Antonin Gramsci, imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascists. “Now is the time of monsters.” Like a time-bomb hidden within Paradise Lost, modernity’s most pertinent work of literature becomes most comprehensible right as the era which produced it comes to an end. We’ve far moved beyond an anemic post-modernism, now we approach a post-Anthropocene, brought on by ecological collapse and climate change, surveillance capitalism and artificial intelligence. As to what the most representative work of literature shall be for the coming epoch, who shall finally justify the ways of man to God – well, that all depends if humans will still exist. And so, like an Ouroboros, we slither back towards our origins, thinking about how the fathers of our modern world, those colonists who conquered Tenochtitlan, whose boots pressed into the soft soil of the South American coast causing oil to bubble up and with Miltonic prescience nicknamed that viscous black blood the “Devil’s excrement.” In part because of the extraction and burning of that very fluid, today we face wildfires and draughts, floods and hurricanes. We now face apocalypse. In a fitting narrative turn, consider the California town on land which today happens to be American, but before was Mexican, previously Spanish, and ultimately Aztec, which in 2018 was rapidly and completely consumed with climate change driven fires that raced down the Sierra Nevada’s like molten silt from Mulciber’s furnace, virtually everything obliterated in a matter of minutes. Among the deadliest of such events until that point, but a harbinger of the future which we all face. The name of that town which was lost? Paradise.
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