Savage Gods
Paul Kingsnorth, Two Dollar Radio
When Paul Kingsnorth writes a book, we at BP pay attention. Novelist, essayist, ecologist and philosopher, and part of the group that started the Dark Mountain project exploring our collective grief at the collapse of nature, he’s quite possibly the premiere independent writer out there — someone working totally outside the mainstream, both in terms of his publishing practice and his content. In this memoir and long personal essay, Kingsnorth describes his move to Ireland with his partner and child. He does so ostensibly because he wants to settle down on the kind of land he could never afford in his native England. But when he gets there, he realizes something else, “I was getting complacent,” he writes. “I was starting to enjoy myself. I had friends and hobbies and a hometown I liked and this was intolerable. I could see myself getting fat and cozy and staying in the same place forever and this vision filled me with horror.” What follows in the subsequent 140 pages is a rumination on restlessness, on isolation, on the increasingly solitary nature of the human condition, which the writer is uniquely able to understand. Loneliness pervades, even as there are more of us than ever before. Kingsnorth asks and tries to answer the question, What does it mean to belong? In the process, he realizes that nobody belongs anymore. Thinking about the ramifications of this truth, and of our desperate need to make meaning out of the increasing nothingness of the now, he rages against the machine, against the dying of the light, “Words are savage gods,” he warns. “In the end, however, well you serve them, they will eat you alive.” But by the end of the book, he pulls back. There can still be beauty. There can still be words: “At midsummer in the west of Ireland, the sky is never really dark. Night doesn’t fall until nearly midnight and dawn takes hours to spread across the wide sky. Whenever you wake, it is light.”