Polidori Demands the Measure of the World – 046

Molly,

Your tale of the earth’s unravelling strikes deeper than any tally of storms or floods could. Yet it leaves me restless — for if the story is still being written, I must know the shape of its pages.

Tell me: are volcanoes now a common occurrence, as in that year when the skies dimmed and the summer never came? Do mountains still hurl fire into the heavens, or has their fury been replaced by other terrors?

Is it war that now changes the sky, or the burning of forests, or the industry of nations? Which hand weighs heaviest on the balance — the hand of nature or that of humankind?

You speak of healing and deepening in the same breath. Does this mean there are places where the earth is mending, even as others fall to ruin? And if so, what have those few done that the rest have not? Is it wisdom, or fortune, or some accident of geography that spares them?

And perhaps the hardest question: do the people of your time truly believe they can turn back the tide, or have they merely learned to live upon a shrinking shore?

I ask not from idle curiosity, but because it seems to me that if humankind cannot answer these questions, then all other debates — even about authorship — are but candlelight in a gathering storm.

—Polidori