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In November of 2015, I happened to be in Paris to attend the United Nations conference on the climate emergency. I say that I happened to be there, but not because I hadn’t intentionally sought out that situation. Actually, environmental issues had been foremost in my mind and my reading for some time now. Let’s say there had been no climate conference in the offing, I’d still have probably come up with some other excuse to get away from home—say an armed conflict, a humanitarian crisis, any preoccupation different from and larger than my own concerns. Perhaps that’s the reason some of us fixate on impending disasters, why we have a proclivity for tragedies—a proclivity that we palm off as noble—and those fixations will serve to build the center of this story, I believe: our need, with every step of our lives that proves excessively complicated, to find something even more complicated, something more compelling and menacing in which we can dilute our own personal suffering. So maybe, really, nobility has nothing at all to do with it.
It was a strange time. My wife and I had tried, repeatedly, to have a child, persisting for roughly three years, subjecting ourselves to one medical intervention after another, each more humiliating than the last. Though I should say, to be as accurate as possible, it was primarily she who subjected herself to those interventions, because for me, after a certain point in the process, it was about playing the part of a pained bystander. Gonadotropin hormone injections, in vitro procedures, even three increasingly desperate trips overseas, about which we breathed not a word to a soul: in spite of all our blind determination and the substantial sum of money we poured into the plan, it hadn’t worked out. The divine message conveyed by those repeated failures was clear: none of this forms part of your destiny. Since I stubbornly refused to admit it, Lorenza made up her own mind—for me as well. One night, tears already dried or entirely unshed (I’ll never know which), she informed me that she was no longer willing to. That’s how she put it, with that truncated expression: I’m no longer willing to. I had rolled over onto my side, turning my back to her, and let the rage steadily fill me, rage that swelled in response to a decision that struck me as unjust and one-sided.
At that time, my own little personal catastrophe loomed much larger in my mind than did its planetary counterpart, the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the retreating glaciers and rising sea levels. In order to get out of that uncomfortable situation, I asked the Corriere della Sera to arrange accreditation for me at the Paris climate conference, even though the deadline for requesting credentials had already expired. I was forced to beg them, in fact, as if attending that conference were a matter of life or death for me. All I was asking was that they pay for my flight and the articles I’d write there. No need for a hotel, I’d gladly arrange to stay at a friend’s place.