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Author john green explores how to live in uncertainty in 'the anthropocene reviewed'.

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, John Green Dutton hide caption

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, John Green

For most of human existence, things didn't change much within a single lifetime.

If you lived a thousand years ago, the tools you used were probably the same ones as your great grandparents. And other than big events like a volcano, the physical world didn't change much either.

Not anymore. Now we live in the Great Acceleration, also known as the Anthropocene, where even the Earth gets updates to its apps. Change (like global warming and pandemics) is the hallmark of this new era. How to live in the midst its uncertainty without falling into despair is the open question. In his new book, The Anthropocene Reviewed , John Green uses humor, wisdom and a keen sense of connections to offer us something like an answer.

Green is a long time book reviewer and author of the best-seller The Fault In Our Stars . Like many of us, Green looks at the changes we face with a mix of dread, bewilderment and the need to find hope. Early on in this book, he notes the contradiction of human power at the heart of living in the Anthropocene. "We are at once far too powerful and not powerful enough," he writes, being able "to radically reshape the Earth's climate and biodiversity but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape it."

But to live in this hyperconnected, hyper-accelerated world also means there can be no escape. As his wife tells him "in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers, there are only participants." That's why Green makes the act of reviewing the central conceit of the book.

Green begins by pointing out a unique feature of our cultural moment. "In the years since I'd been a book reviewer," he writes, "everyone had become a reviewer and everything a subject of review." Driving with his brother through Badlands National Park, he checks its Google reviews to find "Not enough mountain." Later he discovers a review of a bench in Amsterdam, made famous via a scene in the movie version of The Fault In Our Stars . "It's a bench," says the reviewer. Green takes the absurdist quality of these judgments to heart by building a book made of more than 40 short essays, each acting as a "review" of some aspect of our lives in the Anthropocene.

Each essay is a web of salient and unexpected connections. The first, for example, focuses on the song "You'll Never Walk Alone," tracking its global, wandering history. From an origin in the musical Carousel to a chant for British soccer fans, to being sung by British paramedics praising fellow health care workers during the pandemic, Green sees something profoundly necessary in the sappy song. Recalling the line "At the end of the storm there's a golden sky and the sweet song of a lark," Green goes on to note: "But in reality, at the end of a storm there are tree branches everywhere, and downed power lines and flooded rivers." And yet, that pandemic image of paramedics using the song to cheer on their spent colleagues gives Green hope that storms and the courage to face them must go together.

He gives the song "You'll Never Walk Alone" 4.5 stars out 5.

In the essay "Human Temporal Range" Green uses the idea of species longevity (i.e., their temporal range) to muse on Anthropocene dread and the fear of our own extinction. He notes that species have always been coming and going. We humans haven't even been around very long. We're are younger than coyotes, blue whales and turtles, so would the Earth really miss us that much if we go? While this gives him some helpful perspective, Green does, of course, want us to go on . "What scares me about the end of humanity is the end of all those memories..." Greene laments, "if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records those songs won't make a sound anymore. We've caused a lot of suffering, but we've also caused much else."

So, by way of hope, Greene gives "human temporal range" 4 stars out 5.

And so it goes. Jurassic Park 's computer generated velociraptors get just 3 stars because while Green loves them, the real ones were much shorter and probably not very scary. CNN, and all of cable news, get just 2 stars for hindering our chances of dealing with the complex issues of the Anthropocene. The Internet gets 3 stars for being, well, the Internet. "Plague" unsurprisingly gets 1 star (though the essay is an easy 5). And Googling strangers, deservedly, gets 4.

What Green is really telling us with these unexpected stories about Sycamore Trees, Canada Geese and Dr. Pepper is how much there is to love in the world and why that love is worth the effort. As he writes, "To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering both human and otherwise .... We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love anyway, to let it crack me open." The point, says Green — giving us Maurice Sendak's final words — is simple even in, and perhaps especially because of, these challenging times: "Live your life, live your life, live your life."

Adam Frank is an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester and author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth . You can find more from Adam here: @adamfrank4 .

The Anthropocene Reviewed

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet—from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu—on a five-star scale. Complex and rich with detail, the  Anthropocene ’s reviews have been praised as “observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy.” John Green’s gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

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Where can I find more information about the book?

You can find the full press release on the blog , there is more information on the Pengu in po rtal , and John will be sharing updates on vlogbrothers and The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast .

Will all preorders be signed?

John has signed the entire first US and Canadian print run of the book.

In The Anthropocene Reviewed , John Green appraises everything from plagues to Dr Pepper

Scientists are divided about what we should call the current geographic time period. Most argue it’s the Holocene, which is marked by the retreat of glaciers nearly 12,000 years ago, but some say we’ve moved into a new period, the Anthropocene. The idea is that humans have now made such a large impact on the planet by manufacturing plastics, detonating nuclear bombs, and burning fossil fuels that we’ve established a new epoch. Depending on who you ask, it’s a useful term or yet another sign of mankind’s devastating hubris.

John Green, author of Turtles All The Way Down and The Fault In Our Stars , acknowledges it’s probably a bit of both. He began The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast in 2018 to assign five-star reviews to eclectic subjects ranging from Diet Dr Pepper to cholera to the Bonneville Salt Flats, examining what humanity has created and our relationship to the planet and the other species that live on it. Now most of those reviews and a few new ones are available in book form in The Anthropocene Reviewed : Essays On A Human-Centered Planet .

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Fans of the podcast will get the least value from the book. While there are a few new reviews in the collection, such as an assessment of August Sander’s photograph Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance , most of the book is taken directly from episodes of the podcast. Passages have been tweaked a bit to make them flow better in written form, and some have been slightly expanded, with tangents turning into footnotes or edited with new information like the continued growth of Canada geese populations. (That might be why Green signed every copy of the North American version of the book, giving fans a reason to buy one beyond revisiting a favorite subject without listening to commercials for Audible and life insurance.)

Those who haven’t listened to the podcast will find Green’s style akin to that of someone like Susan Orlean, combining deeply personal anecdotes with fascinating facts. The balance between them varies wildly, with an entry on Monopoly largely providing an origin story of the game combined with some scathing commentary on American capitalism, while the review of sycamore trees is barely about the plants at all and mostly about Green’s struggles with depression. The result is like falling into a Wikipedia hole if the entries were written as a form of therapy.

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Still there’s a soothing quality to Green’s prose and his gentle assessment of humanity. Many of the essays were written since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the format works particularly well for grappling with this tumultuous time in human history. His review of “plague,” which looks at some of the worst epidemics to affect the species, concludes that “Plague is a one-star phenomenon, of course, but our response to it need not be.”

The impact of the pandemic is less on the nose but still poignant in other essays. Green gives a glowing review to the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the anthem of the Liverpool Football Club that was also sung by British paramedics in March 2020 to their colleagues in the ICU. A far too generous evaluation of “wintry mix” includes an adorable anecdote about how Green used some of his time in lockdown to build a garden for a groundhog that had been raiding his soybeans. By dwelling in the mundanity and strangeness of the pandemic, he manages to capture the feeling of living through history while still lacking the context by which to process it.

Green admits in his postscript that the book may be overfilled with quotes, with chapters peppered with lines from the likes of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. The apology feels unnecessary considering how powerful some of Green’s own prose can be. In a chapter on the Lascaux cave paintings, Green writes about how hard life was for prehistoric humans but notes “and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.”

He expresses a similarly beautiful sentiment when writing about the World’s Largest Ball Of Paint, a roadside attraction where visitors have spent 40 years adding 26,000 coats of paint to a baseball. “Maybe in the end art and life are like the world’s largest ball of paint,” Green writes. “You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can. In time, it gets painted over. The ball gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your paint. And eventually, maybe nobody knows about it except for you.”

The idea of geological epochs was defined by scientists searching through the fossil record for evidence of species that have been extinct for millions of years. The very idea of the Anthropocene requires the morbid thought that someday another species might sift through layers of rock and dirt for evidence that we existed. In a chapter on humanity’s temporal range, whose corresponding podcast episode originally aired at the end of March 2020, Green writes that when he told his brother and frequent collaborator Hank that he was worried about the pandemic, Hank responded, “The species will survive this.” While he’s honest about humanity’s failings, Green is also optimistic about our ability to grow and endure as a species. And should we fail, he’s at least hopeful that someone else will remember us.

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The Internet: A Review

From the compuserve teen forum to memes in my pocket, it’s been a mixed experience..

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

In John Green’s new book, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet , the author reviews different aspects of humanity on a five-star scale. This article is adapted and reprinted from the book with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by John Green.

When the internet first came to our house in the early 1990s, so far as I could tell, the internet was inside of a box. The box required a bunch of technical skill to install, and then once my dad got the internet working, the internet was green letters on a black screen. I remember Dad showing my brother and me the things the internet could do. “Look,” he would say. “The internet can show you what the weather is like right now in Beijing.” Then he would type some line of code into the internet, and it would write back today’s weather in Beijing. “Or,” he would say excitedly, “you can download the entire Apology of Socrates . For free! And read it right here, in the house.” 1

To my dad, this must have seemed like an actual miracle. But I was not a fan. For one thing, we couldn’t get phone calls while my dad was online, on account of how the internet used the phone lines. Admittedly, 14-year-old me wasn’t fielding a ton of calls, but still. More than that, it seemed to me that the internet was primarily a forum for talking about the internet—my dad would read (and tell us about) endless user manuals and message boards he’d read about how the internet worked, and what it might be able to do in the future, and so on.

One day, Dad showed me that on the internet, you could talk to real people all over the world. He explained, “You can practice your French by going to a French forum,” and he showed me how it worked. I messaged a couple people on the forum: “Comment ça va?” They responded in real time, with real French, which was unfortunate, as I didn’t know much French. I started wondering if there might be an English-language version of the service, and it turned out there was. In fact, there was one built just for me: the CompuServe Teen Forum.

On the CompuServe Teen Forum, nobody knew anything about me. They didn’t know that I was a miserable, cringingly awkward kid whose voice often creaked with nervousness. They didn’t know I was late to puberty, and they didn’t know the names people called me at school.

And paradoxically, because they didn’t know me, they knew me far better than anyone in my real life. I remember one evening, in an instant message conversation, I told my CompuServe friend Marie about the “night feeling.” The night feeling was my private name for the wave that crashed over me most school nights when I got into bed. My stomach would tighten and I’d feel the worry radiating out from my belly button. I’d never told anyone about the night feeling, and my heart was racing as I typed. Marie responded that she also knew the night feeling, and that she sometimes found comfort in listening quietly to her clock radio. I tried that, and it helped.

But most of the time, my Teen Forum friend group did not share our secrets. We shared inside jokes, and learned/built/borrowed/created together. By the summer of 1993, the CompuServe Teen Forum was a vast universe of mythology and references, from jokes about the TV show Barney & Friends to endless acronyms and abbreviations. The internet was still just green letters on a black screen, so we couldn’t use images, but we arranged text characters into shapes. The idea of ASCII art, as it is known, had been around for decades, but we hadn’t been around for decades, and so we felt like we were discovering it as we built everything from extremely simple images—like :-) for example—to ridiculously complex (and often obscene) ones. I don’t recall using a word to describe what we were doing, but these days we would call this stuff memes.

That summer, with school out of the way, I was able to devote myself full-time to the Teen Forum. I even got something called an email address—a series of randomly generated digits @compuserve.com. Back then, the internet charged by the hour, which became a real issue because I wanted to spend every hour on it. Now it was my parents who complained about the phone line being tied up. They loved that I was making friends, that I was writing and reading so much, but they could not afford a $100 monthly internet bill. At this point, a lifeline appeared when I was “hired” as a moderator for the Teen Forum. The payment came in the form of all the free internet I wanted, and I wanted a lot of it. CompuServe even paid for a separate phone line so I could be online constantly. If a single event in my life occurred outdoors that summer, I do not recall it.

I fear I’ve been romanticizing. The early-’90s internet had many of the problems the current internet does. While I recall the Teen Forum being well moderated, the same racism and misogyny that populate today’s comments sections was prevalent 30 years ago. And then, as now, you could fall very far down the rabbit hole of the internet’s highly personalized information feeds until conspiracy theories began to feel more real than the so-called facts. 2

I have wonderful memories of that summer, and also traumatic ones. A few years ago, I ran into an old friend, who said of our high school, “It saved my life. But it also did a lot of other things.” So, too, with the internet.

These days, after drinking from the internet’s fire hose for 30 years, I’ve begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don’t know if it’s my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, “ The world is too much with us; late and soon .”

What does it say that I can’t imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being , so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

By John Green

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you’re living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

I give the internet three stars.

[1]. One of the weird solipsisms of American life, especially toward the end of the 20 th century, was that the news almost never talked about the weather outside of the United States unless there was some natural disaster unfolding. I guess I should also say that it is still kind of cool that you can download the Apology of Socrates for free on the internet.

[2]. I lived this experience, actually. In the early ’90s, I became entranced by something called the Phantom Time Hypothesis, which held that around 300 years of time between the 7 th and 10 th centuries never actually happened and were instead invented by the Catholic Church. I was originally turned on to this idea by one of those memes that is itself not sure whether it’s ironic. The conspiracy theory, which was pretty widespread at the time, held that I was really living not in the year 1993 but instead around 1698, and that a bunch of years had been faked so that the Church could … maintain power? The details of it escape me, but it’s amazing what you can believe when you’re down the rabbit hole.

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The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet Audio CD – CD, June 22, 2021

• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Audio
• Publication date June 22, 2021
• Dimensions 5.09 x 1.14 x 5.91 inches
• ISBN-10 059340954X
• ISBN-13 978-0593409541
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition (June 22, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 059340954X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593409541
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.09 x 1.14 x 5.91 inches
• #8,602 in Essays (Books)
• #11,833 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
• #12,767 in Books on CD

About the author

John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with David Levithan), and The Fault in Our Stars. His many accolades include the Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and the Edgar Award. John has twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. With his brother, Hank, John is one half of the Vlogbrothers (youtube.com/vlogbrothers) and co-created the online educational series CrashCourse (youtube.com/crashcourse). You can join the millions who follow him on Twitter @johngreen and Instagram @johngreenwritesbooks or visit him online at johngreenbooks.com.

John lives with his family in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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Customers find the book worth reading and interesting. They also find the essays fascinating and thought-provoking. Readers praise the writing quality as delicious, creative, and awe-striking. They describe the humor as funny and entertaining. They mention the book is beautiful, meaningful, and heartfelt. Customers feel a plethora of emotions and connect to the human experience.

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Customers find the book worth reading, fun, and thought-provoking. They say it keeps their interest and is one of the best nonfiction books they've read in years. Readers also mention the author has a delightful way of pulling them into the moment.

"...but even if you don't know anything about John, this is still a worthwhile and beautiful read. Just keep the tissues handy...." Read more

"...John Green's writing here is very polished and still offers a delightful yet philosophical read ...." Read more

"...Somehow, oddly, this book gave me hope . I can't say enough positive things about it, and I highly recommend it." Read more

"... This book is magic ...." Read more

Customers find the essays fascinating, thought-provoking, and emotional. They say the book elevates their own ponderings and language. Readers also say it gives them a deep appreciation for life and the world around them. They mention the book is educational and poignant.

"...These stories are heartfelt, funny, and interesting , and the emotion really sneaks up on you. I found myself crying along to more than one essay...." Read more

"...This is an insightful , thought-provoking, funny, and sometimes emotional collection of short essays about various random topics that John Green has..." Read more

"...It's a personal experience tied into humanity as a whole. It'll make you feel happy , sad, angry, and hopeful as life tends to do...." Read more

"...is open about his fight with depression while also shedding so much hope throughout the book --not cheap "get-well-soon" card type hope, as well-..." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book delicious, magnificent, and creative. They say the little essays are great if you want a quick read to learn tiny tidbits. Readers also mention the writing is polished and reads like a journal. They also appreciate the quality and depth of thought used by John Green in expressing himself.

"...These stories are heartfelt , funny, and interesting, and the emotion really sneaks up on you. I found myself crying along to more than one essay...." Read more

"...is an insightful, thought-provoking, funny, and sometimes emotional collection of short essays about various random topics that John Green has..." Read more

"...Even if this information is a little rehashed, John Green's writing here is very polished and still offers a delightful yet philosophical read...." Read more

"...well as finding out some of the things he loves and doesn't has made excellent , thought-provoking reading...." Read more

Customers find the book humorous, informative, and entertaining. They say it has funny parts, sad parts, and thoughts they can identify with. Readers also mention the book has gems of insight, history, and humor.

"...These stories are heartfelt, funny , and interesting, and the emotion really sneaks up on you. I found myself crying along to more than one essay...." Read more

"...This is an insightful, thought-provoking, funny , and sometimes emotional collection of short essays about various random topics that John Green has..." Read more

"...His reviews and stars are great way to organize the thoughts and make it fun ...." Read more

"...I appreciate the differences and find his essays fascinating and humorous at times . I am so glad I bought it for my husband...." Read more

Customers find the book beautiful, moving, and life-affirming. They appreciate the elegant essays and intimate continuation of their experience. Readers also describe the book as meaningful, heartfelt, and spectacular. They mention the signature makes it feel special.

"...This book felt like a beautiful and intimate continuation of that experience, and much like a conversation with a friend, felt very two sided...." Read more

"...John’s signature is a beautiful purple , and the page is slightly creased above it. “A real person wrote this book,” I told my daughter. “..." Read more

"...This happens with such grace, art , killer writing skills and illusion that again, your brain is cornered to one and one answer alone: Magic...." Read more

"...delicious prose and the threads connecting each essay, and the beautiful and terrible and wonderful life of a human that unfolds...." Read more

Customers find the book to be incredibly human and genuine. They say the essays are touching and make them feel connected to the human experience. Readers also mention the book is both raw and refreshing, and has brain-tingling moments.

"...stories are heartfelt, funny, and interesting, and the emotion really sneaks up on you . I found myself crying along to more than one essay...." Read more

"...It'll make you feel happy, sad , angry, and hopeful as life tends to do...." Read more

"...The paperback version has two additional essays, with extra depth and feeling ." Read more

"...’s voice; his perspective is both raw and refreshing, harsh at times but ever hopeful ...." Read more

Customers appreciate the quality of the signature. They say it's an amazing bonus.

"...The fact that each copy is signed makes this feel all the more special...." Read more

"...It also helped that it is autographed and we watch his tiktok of him autographing the pages. Glad we could get one! Would give it a 10/10 if I could." Read more

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"...the wrong version and got the large print by accident which included no signature ...." Read more

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"...I have loved all of John’s work, but this book is different and one of my favorites...." Read more

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BACK TO NEIGHBORHOOD READS

• Oct 17, 2021

“The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet" | Reviewed by Pat Sainz

Updated: Oct 21, 2021

“The Anthropocene Reviewed,” by John Green is a series of essays about a variety of subjects that have influenced Green in some way over the years. He reflects on 44 topics in short chapters, ending each with a 1-5 star review, a popular rating form for just about everything from restaurants, to movies, to items sold on Amazon.

“Anthropocene” is a term given to the current geological age, in which human activity has greatly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. Green personalizes his essays by reflecting upon the impact of each subject on his world and ours. He provides historical information that may not be known to most people.

For example, within the chapter called “Teddy Bears,” Green tells the story of how cuddly cloth teddy bears as we know them got their name. He includes the brief history of our relationship with bears, the real (and harrowing) story of President Teddy Roosevelt’s hunted bear, and ends with giving the teddy bear 2 ½ stars.

In another short chapter, Green reviews the song “Auld Lang Syne.” He provides a history but personalizes it by referring to his job as a book reviewer, his friendship with the late author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and the song’s message that life and love will survive, even though we won’t. He gives the song 5 stars.

Other chapters are called “Googling Strangers” (4 stars), Indianapolis (4 stars and Green’s hometown), CNN (2 stars), and air-conditioning (3 stars).

Green writes with grace, poignancy, and honest reflection about his own life which includes suffering from a mental illness. Some of Green’s stories were taken from a podcast he recently ended, also called “The Anthropocene Reviewed.”

The beauty of this book is that it causes one to pay close attention to everyday things. For example, I know that as I sit here and type on my MacBook Pro, behind it is a story that likely stretches back a hundred years, not just to 2006, and probably has some unsavory history attached to it.

Were I writing as Green, I would reflect that it is a miracle invention that allows me to communicate with my mother through its Facebook app as she remains isolated with COVIDin a nursing home miles away. (I give the MacBook Pro 5 stars.)

Buy the Book.

About the Author: Green is the author of the award winning young-adult books, “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down.” “The Fault in Our Stars” was made into a movie in 2014. The novels are based on Green’s own experiences as a young chaplain in a cancer ward and his own struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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The Anthropocene Reviewed

98 pages • 3 hours read

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 11

Chapters 12-22

Chapters 23-33

Chapter 34-Postscript

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 23-33 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 23 summary: “the yips”.

After years of notable success, sports stars can suddenly lose confidence and go into a slump called “the yips,” a painful psychological dysfunction that can derail a career. Golfers get it more than most. Tennis star Ana Ivanovic, once rated number one in the world, lost her ability to make good serves, and for a time this derailed her career. However, she developed a different serve and rose back up to number five before retiring.

Most consider the yips psychological. However, the mind interacts with the body, which sometimes brings mischief to the process.

When pitchers suffer from the yips, it affects their ability to throw a ball to precise spots in the strike zone. The tremendously accurate pitcher Rick Ankiel got the yips and descended into the lowest professional leagues but then switched to the outfield, developed his batting, returned to the majors, and one year hit more than 50 home runs. The yips get only one and a half stars.

Chapter 24 Summary: “Auld Lang Syne”

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The Anthropocene Reviewed

Auld lang syne.

Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. Today, in this podcast’s first-ever one-review episode, I’ll be reviewing Auld Lang Syne, a song that is today most associated with New Years’ Eve. I find it fascinating that in a world where so much is so new, we welcome new years by singing a very old song.

The chorus starts out, “For auld lang syne, my Jo, for auld lang syne. I’ll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.” “Jo” is a Scots word that can be straightforwardly translated to “dear,” but “Auld Lang Syne” is more complicated. It literally means something like “old long since,” but it’s idiomatically similar to “the old times.” We have a phrase in English somewhat similar to “For auld lang syne;” the phrase is, “For old times’ sake.”

Here’s a bit of my old long since: In the summer of 2001, the writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal emailed Booklist Magazine to enquire about a review. At the time, I was working for Booklist as a publishing assistant; most of my job was data entry, but I also answered many of the low-priority emails that came in. So I responded to Amy with an update on the status of the review, and I also mentioned that on a personal note I had loved her zine-like column in Might! Magazine. I told her I often thought about one bit she’d written, which went: “Every time I’m flying and the captain announces the beginning of our descent, the same thing goes through my mind. While we’re still pretty high above the city, I’ll think, if the plane went down now, we would definitely not be OK. A bit lower, and no, we still wouldn’t be OK. But as we get real close to the ground, I’ll relax. OK. We’re low enough now; if it crashed now, we might be OK.”

She wrote me back the next day, and asked if I was a writer, and I said I was trying to be, and she asked if I had anything that was two minutes long that might work on the radio.

We don’t really know when Auld Lang Syne was written. The first verse goes: Should old acquaintance be forgot / And never brought to mind? / Should old acquaintance be forgot / And auld lang syne.

Versions of that date back at least 400 years, But we owe the current song to the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. In December of 1788, he wrote to his friend, Frances Dunlop. “Is not the Scotch phrase Auld Lang Syne exceedingly expressive? There is an old song and tune which has often thrilled through my soul. … Light be the turf on the breast of the heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment.” And on the back of the letter, Burns wrote the first known draft of Auld Lang Syne. At least three of the verses were probably his own, although he would later say of the song that he “took it down from an old man.” 

Part of what makes dating various lines within the song difficult is the song’s eternality: It’s about drinking together and remembering old times, and almost every idea within it--from picking daisies to wandering through fields to toasting old friends over a beer--could’ve been written five hundred, a thousand, or even three thousand years ago. It’s also a rousing ode to splitting the check incidentally, with part of the second verse going, “And surely you’ll buy your pint cup and surely I’ll buy mine,” but mostly the song is just an unapologetic celebration of the good old days and of looking back upon them.

I guess I should tell you that Amy is dead. Otherwise, her death within this review might seem like some kind of narrative device, which I don’t want. So, okay. She is dead. The rare present tense sentence that, once it becomes true, stays true forever. But we aren’t there yet. We were still in the past, I think. She asked if I had anything for the radio, and I sent her three little essays, and she liked one of them, and asked me to come in and record it for her show on Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ. In the broadcast, you could hear the nerves in my voice; it was the first time I’d ever reached such a large audience. After that, Amy invited me to be on her show more often--and within a year, I was recording frequent commentaries for WBEZ, and then for NPR’s All Things Considered. 

Sometimes, Amy took me out to lunch. She was everything I wanted to be--happily married, a committed and loving parent, and a successful writer. She was also incredibly good at gift-giving. At our first lunch, I told her that when I moved to Chicago, my mom asked me to carry forty dollars with me in my left pants pocket whenever I went outside, so I would have something to give anyone who might want to mug me. And I told Amy that I still always kept forty bucks in my left pocket, and that I tried never to spend my mugging money except in cases of real need. The next time we met, Amy surprised me with two gifts: One was a money clip engraved with my initials, JMG, and the other was a money clip engraved with MM. Mugging Money.

In April of 2002, Amy convened some of her writer and musician friends for an event at the Chopin Theater in Chicago called Writers’ Block Party. She asked me to read for it, and I did, and people laughed at my dumb jokes, and Amy hired someone to walk around the theater giving everyone compliments, and the complimenter said they liked my shoes, which were these brand-new Adidas sneakers, and that’s why I have worn Adidas sneakers almost every day for the last seventeen years.

Robert Burns originally had a different tune in mind for Auld Lang Syne than the one most of us know, and although he himself realized the air was “mediocre,” you will still sometimes hear that original arrangement--it is used, for example, in the noted 2008 film Sex and the City . But the melody most of us know first appeared in 1799, in George Thomson’s Select Songs of Scotland . By then, Robert Burns was gone. He was only 37 when he died of a heart condition possibly exacerbated by his habit of raising many a pint glass to old acquaintances. In his last letter, he wrote to Frances Dunlop, “An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” 

But the song was just getting started--within decades, it became a popular part of New Year’s Eve celebrations in Scotland, a holiday known as Hogmanay that can trace its history back to winter solstice rituals. By 1818, Beethoven had written an arrangement of it, and it was beginning to travel throughout Europe and the English-speaking world. Today, Auld Lang Syne is often played at Japanese department stores just before they close. Between 1945 and 1948, the tune was used in South Korea’s national anthem. In the Netherlands, its melody inspired one of the country’s most famous football chants. And it’s a staple of film soundtracks, from Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 movie The Gold Rush to It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946 to Minions in 2015.

I think Auld Lang Syne is popular in Hollywood not just because it’s in the public domain and therefore cheap, but also because it’s the rare song that is genuinely wistful--it acknowledges human longing without romanticizing it, and it captures how each new year is a product of all the old ones. When I sing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve, I forget the words like everyone does, until I get to the fourth verse, which I do have memorized: “We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine, but seas between us broad have roared since Auld Lang Syne.” And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past--seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I’ll never speak again to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. And so we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

In her strange and beautiful interactive memoir Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal , Amy wrote, “If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.”

In her writing, Amy often sought to reconcile the infinite nature of consciousness and love and yearning with the finite nature of the universe and all that inhabits it. Towards the end of Textbook , she wrote a multiple choice question: “In the alley, there is a bright pink flower peeking out through the asphalt. A. It looks like futility. B. It looks like hope.” Anyway, for me at least, Auld Lang Syne captures exactly what it feels like to see a bright pink flower peeking out through the asphalt, and how it feels to know you have 12,395 times to look at a tree. 

After the break, we’ll turn our attention to the astonishing story of Auld Lang Syne in World War I, but first:

In 2005, Amy published a memoir in the form of an encyclopedia called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life . That book ends, “I was here, you see. I was.” Another sentence that once it becomes true, never stops being true. That book came out just a few months before my first novel, Looking for Alaska . Soon thereafter, my wife Sarah got into graduate school at Columbia and so we moved to New York. Amy and I stayed in touch and collaborated occasionally over the next decade--I played a bit part in an experience she curated for hundreds of people on August 8th, 2008 in Chicago’s Millennium Park--but it was never again like it had been in those early days.

She found out she had cancer not long after finishing Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal , and she called me. She knew that in the years after The Fault in Our Stars was published, I’d come to know many young people who were gravely ill, and she wanted to know if I had advice for her. I told her what I think is true--that love survives death. But she wanted to know how young people react to death. How her kids would. She wanted to know if her kids and her husband would be okay, or how she could make it okay for them, and that ripped me up. Although I’m usually quite comfortable talking with sick people, with my friend I found myself stumbling over words, overwhelmed with my own sadness and worry. 

They won’t be okay, of course, but they will go on, and the love you poured into them will go on. That’s what I should’ve said. But what I actually said, while crying, was, “How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.”

In my experience, dying people often have wonderful stories of the horrible things that healthy people say to them, but I’ve never heard of anybody saying anything close to as stupid as, “You do so much yoga.” I hope that Amy got some narrative mileage out of me saying something so profoundly idiotic in her hour of need. But I also know I failed her, after she was there for me so many times. I know she forgives me, but still, I desperately wish I could’ve said something useful. Or perhaps not said anything at all. When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes--often, in fact--you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain at a children’s hospital: Don’t just do something. Stand there.

“Auld Lang Syne” was a popular song in World War I--versions of it were sung in trenches not just by British soldiers, but by French and German and Austrian ones as well, and the song even played a small role in one of the strangest and most beautiful moments in world history, the Christmas Truce of 1914. 

On Christmas Eve that year, in part of the war’s Western Front in what is now Belgium, around 100,000 British and German soldiers emerged from their trenches, and met each other in the so-called No Man’s Land between their front lines. One 19-year-old British soldier wrote his mother, “Yesterday the British and Germans met and shook hands in the ground between the trenches and exchanged souvenirs ... Marvellous, isn’t it?” A German soldier remembered that a British soldier “brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was.” Elsewhere on the front, Captain Sir Edward Hulse recalled a Christmas sing-along that “ended up with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Wuttenbergers, etc., joined in. It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on cinematograph film I should have sworn it was faked.”

Hulse, who was 25 years old at the time, would be killed on the Western Front less than four months later. At least seventeen million people would die as a direct result of the war--more than half the current population of Canada.

By Christmas of 1916, soldiers didn’t want truces--the devastating losses of the war, and the growing use of poison gas, had embittered the combatants. But many also had no idea why they were fighting and dying for tiny patches of ground so far from home. And in the British trenches, soldiers began to sing the tune of Auld Lang Syne with different words: We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

Here was a world without whys, where life was meaninglessness all the way down. Modernity had come to war, and the rest of life. The art critic Robert Hughes once referred to the “peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition,” and the trenches of World War I were hell indeed.

Although she was a playful and optimistic writer, Amy was not deluded about the nature of suffering, or about its centrality in human life. Her work--whether picture book or memoir--always finds a way to acknowledge misery without giving in to it. One of the last lines she ever wrote was, “Death may be knocking on my door, but I’m not getting out of this glorious bath to answer it.”

In her public appearances, Amy would sometimes use that recursive lament of British soldiers and transform it without ever changing the tune or the words. She would ask an audience to sing that song with her--we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. And although it is, of course, a profoundly nihilistic song written about the modernist hell of repetition, singing that song with Amy, I could always see the hope in it. It became a statement that we are here--meaning that we are together, and not alone. And it’s also a statement that we are , that we exist, and it’s a statement that we are here , that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim in hope that we are here. I don’t think such hope is foolish or idealistic or misguided. I believe that hope is, for lack of a better word, true.

We live in hope--that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. As Emily Dickinson put it, hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. And we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. Sing it with me, wherever you are. Think of those across the broad and roaring seas, and sing with me. You won’t be more offtune than I am. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. 

I give Auld Lang Syne five stars.

Thanks for listening to the Anthropocene Reviewed, which was written by me, edited by Stan Muller, and produced by Rosianna Halse Rojas and Tony Phillips. Joe Plourde is our technical director. Hannis Brown makes the music. If you’d like to learn more about Amy Krouse Rosenthal, her work, and her legacy, I encourage you to visit amykrouserosenthalfoundation.org. Thanks also to Claire, Jared, and Katherine, who wrote to suggest a review of Auld Lang Syne. If you’d like to suggest a topic for review or just say hi, please email us at anthropocenereviewed at gmail dot com. And if you enjoy the podcast, I hope you’ll tell a friend about it, or write a review on your podcast reviewing app of choice. I recognize the irony of a podcast that makes fun of five-star taings asking for a five-star rating, but welcome to the anthropocene. Thanks again for listening; we’ll leave you today with a little snippet of Amy and friends reminding us that we are here.