PENICILLIN AND THE ANTHROPOCENE APOCALYPSE
Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dishin 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drugand by the fifties had become both widely availableand cheap, whichin time for me, who without it would have dieda child on more than one occasion, but didn’tand grew to see the things around me die instead.My first cat was struck by a car on Daniels Lane,I was five. My father’s mother died when I was six,my mother’s three years later, then a godmother,an uncle, a favorite aunt, and then the floodgatesopened as generations passed away in the wayof the world, my parents, my in-laws, eventuallymy brother, and meanwhile the world around meseemed to abide, but let’s not be fooled by that.The fireflies I loved to trap on summer eveningsand leave in jars to flash till dawn like capturedstarlight at some point blinked their final blink,I haven’t seen one in ages. The phosphorescentalgae that set waves on fire off Gibson’s Beachand dressed a midnight skinny-dip with ribbonsof liquid flame have dwindled through the yearsand all but disappeared, and now every dip is dim.The glacier at Entrèves, in whose chilly atmosphereI hiked from bar to bar to sip aperitifs, retreatedup its valley at modern glacial speed, one decade,and with it went the primulas and alpine edelweiss.The birds and bees and dogwood trees, the frogs,the reefs, the plentiful fish nonetheless fished out,creatures great and small are rushing to extinctionin the Anthropocene apocalypse that will surely beour signature, our sign, the fossil record of our era.A generation arrives, a generation departs, and youcan’t take it with you, but ours has certainly tried,and what world will we bequeath to our posterityas suns rise, winds whirl, and rivers run to the sea?What is ours to leave but guilt and mute regret,whose scientific progress proved a devil’s bargain,whose each advance was a next step into oblivion?Annihilators, executioners, poisoners, assassins,our time on earth has been the most destructive ever,albeit the only one possible for me, who in any otherwould have felt no need for mourning or remorsebut might have remained an innocent always:young, blameless, and dead.
