The premise of Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (New York, 2022) is a most splendid one. Imagine, she proposes, that it is 66 million years ago and dinosaurs are the monarchs of the earth. What was it like, in that era, to be alive in, say, the steamy forests where Wyoming now lies — a world in which club-tailed ankylosaurs were tracked by tyrannosaurs while primitive mammals scuttled in the ferny underbrush. Rich and strange, certainly. And then, how was it all transformed on "the worst day in the history of the planet" when the Chicxulub asteroid plowed into the Yucatan? One fine day, the dinosaurs were triumphant; and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the six-mile-wide asteroid crash lands and everything goes all kablooey — the sure and firm-set earth shakes, the atmosphere turns furnace hot, and acid rain and smoke and fire and tsunamis snuff out 80 per cent of our planet's animal species.
It's a fabulous idea for a masterpiece of science writing, and consequently I'm grieved to report that The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a disappointing book. It is loose and melodramatic and outrageously padded — a thirty page essay turned into a swollen three hundred page opus. It's much too pop; it's insufficiently serious and therefore leaves poor frustrated me craving data and detail rather than reiteration. Who could believe that the high drama of Chicxulub could become quite so tedious? I put the blame on Ms. Black's literary agent, who, I have no shadow of doubt, advised her to "turn your idea into a book, and keep it easy — not too technical — you'll sell a lot more copies."
What a shame, because Black is well-informed and writes with intermittent flair. She loves her reptiles, and in particular displays genuine warmth, almost reverence, for every young person's favorite dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. An infatuation that lingers from her childhood, I suspect. I myself, not similarly transfixed, might have supposed that T. Rex had been expelled from the Terrible Lizard Hall of Fame sometime in the 1990s, when it came to be gospel that the 60-foot tall monster was not a top-of-the-food-chain predator but merely a snuffling scavenger. Was it not revealed to us that the creature's meager brain was dwarfed by its olfactory bulbs, so that it could effortlessly detect decaying flesh over the unbounded western landscapes? And was it not also agreed that its puny forelegs were useless for pursuit or attack? Black will have nothing of such paleontological revisionism. Her T. Rex is a hunter, lurking in ambush to pounce and to crunch with one powerful bite the enormous protuberant osteoderms that protected the stegosaurus spine. To me, the idea that a beast as gigantic as a tyrannosaurus could conceal itself behind bush or boulder and sneakily lunge at its prey seems totally ludicrous.
Black, bless her kindly heart, firmly embraces the unrevised T. Rex. Her loyalty is transcendent. In a burst of psychological overkill, she describes her crush on the dinosaur as an example of anemoia. And what, readers rightly ask, is anemoia? It's an unfamiliar word that describes a baffling concept. Upon investigation,"anemoia" turns out to be a recent coinage, a "fire-new" word (as WS, in LLL, calls such innovations). It's "a nostalgia for a time one has never known," such as Black seems to feel about the years and days that preceded Chicxulub. And here I must once again reveal my want of imagination. Anemoia, however hard I labor to grasp the idea, is too subtle for my downright brain. Isn't it the case that "nostalgia" is by definition a cherishing of something in one's own personal history, as such a one as I might remember with warmth a concert or a wedding or that long ago glorious day in which I, batting leadoff, started the game with a triple to right field.
I can't quite fathom a nostalgia for something I've not known in my own person. The emotion that Black describes I would call simple curiosity. I'm as intrigued as the next guy about the past and I can certainly summon a yearning to have been present at some great historical event, but I wouldn't call it anemoia. For example, I might wish that I had been at Fenway on September 30, 1960, the day that Ted Williams blasted a home run on his very last time at bat — but I wasn't there and it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. [Full disclosure: I was in attendance, just behind third base, the previous day, September 29, and therefore missed the moment by a scant twenty-four hours.] Unlike Black, I'm not anemoiac about the dinosaur-dominated world of the K-P boundary, but I have other anemoiac — as I've now redefined the word — yearnings.
My most pressing and immediate wish would be to have joined the crowd at a performance at the Globe Theatre in London, perhaps of Hamlet in 1599 or Macbeth in 1606. Why? Because even though Shakespeare's works have been studied microscopically for more than 400 years, no one really knows how those plays originally looked or sounded. My suspicion is that they were far more foreign, more strange, less realistic and more primitive than scholars recognize. After all, the most brilliant play ever written, King Lear, was performed in daylight and the actors had to project their voices to a crowd of 2000 people, many of them shuffling about, gossiping, and cracking hazelnuts. No sets, no curtains, no lighting, and no scenery to speak of. I'd guess that the cast employed a style of dramaturgy closer to its medieval inheritance of allegorical representation than we like to admit. Furthermore, I am convinced that if I were present there at the actual Globe, I would discover an endless series of unknown unknowns. Unimaginable unknowns, that would knock our anemoiac socks off. The past is another country; they do things a heck of a lot differently there.
But wait! My dormant anemoia, now aroused, yearns to experience in my own person other events in the past. Where else to indulge my wants? Certainly in Athens, at a performance of a play by Sophocles — which I can guarantee to be a hundred times stranger than anything London could possibly offer.
But why only the arts? Now that I think of it, I would love to take a gander at forested Manhattan Island when Henry Hudson's Half Moon made its first landfall. I could have talked to the Lenapes; tried to warn them about the dangers that were coming down the pike. And there's much more. Just prior to struggling through The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I read Marie Favereau's The Horde (2021), a most fascinating history of the Mongol civilization that conquered and controlled the area from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Favereau's depiction of the Mongols was novel and disorienting, essentially because I'm accustomed to think about great empires as centered on a dominant imperial city — Athens, Rome, London. I believe that I understand a little of what life might have been like in Rome; after all, I've read some of the ancient historians and I know a bit about cities. I've even toured Pompeii, for goodness sake! But the Mongols did not live in cities; they were not particularly literate, they were unabashedly polygamous, animist, and almost entirely nomadic. It's a challenge to imagine a "city" of a hundred thousand people in constant migratory motion. When Mongol men went to war, which they seemed to do often and always, they brought along the women and children, the cattle-drawn carts and wagons and the felt tents along with their horses, goats and sheep. To spend time with a wandering horde, an entirely unfamiliar form of civilization, and to try to understand their mental world, would certainly challenge and enlarge my (and your) conception of what it means to be a human being.
Favereau doesn't dwell on such speculations (she is more concerned with military history than social or psychological matters) but nevertheless the ways in which the migrants related to each other and to their environment had to be entirely foreign to us mostly urban, post Age of Reason moderns. What was it like to be a Mongol? Perhaps I feel this question personally because a recent examination of my DNA tells me that I'm 1% Asian by genetic inheritance. I assume, naturally, that like approximately 16,000,000 other people, I'm directly descended from Mongol leader Chinggis (formerly Genghiz) Khan through one of his seven wives or his innumerable concubines. Is it anemoia, a recognition of my kinship to Grandpa Genghiz, that has produced in me, this morning, such a wildness in the blood? Or is it the caffeine?
In actual fact, although I'm most curious about Mongol life, I don't think that I would have made a good nomad. In the first place, I suffer from serious directional disabilities and would no doubt promptly misplace myself on the vast and featureless Eurasian steppe; and secondly, I lack enthusiasm for subsisting on kumis, the fermented mare's milk which was the staple of the Mongol diet.
Let me now admit that while I indulge some pseudo-anemoia for my distant Mongol forebears, I feel much closer to my more recent Ukrainian shtetl ancestors. If I could be plopped down in the western Ukraine, I might be able to absorb the texture of life in Staroconstantinov in 1895, just before brave Isaiah and Eta set out for America. As things stand, I know almost nothing of any importance about the lives of my eastern European ancestors. How did these resilient folks survive centuries, millennia, of dearth, disease and pogroms? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? What, indeed, did they do for "fun," if they had any conception of fun? What did they read? How did the sexes relate to each other? How did they find privacy? And most significantly: how seriously did they embrace that narrow, all-encompassing and demanding religion?
A nineteenth-century shtetl seems impossibly foreign and faraway, but in the longer time frame, it's actually very recent. The most distant past that we can readily imagine is when the archeological record begins to appear — perhaps five thousand year ago. But my and your fully human ancestors migrated from the Olduvai Gorge some 60,000 years ago, which leaves approximately 55,000 years without any data at all — or at least nothing beyond the merest occasional trace. For these many millennia our forbears lived in world where there were no cities, no writing, no pottery, no weaving, no domesticated plants or animals, no metals, no wheels and therefore no vehicles — only stone hand axes and later spears and much later still bows and arrows. Two thousand five hundred precarious generations of foraging! I would like to see for myself how our common ancestors managed to survive when the gigantic short-faced bear competed for the cave and the terrifying European lion lurked in the shadows. I suspect also that the most dangerous predator our g g g… grandfathers faced was the tribe next door — otherwise why would we have inherited such hostility to people who look or act just slightly differently than ourselves. Wouldn't it be profoundly anemoiac to join a family of our mutual forebears for a week or two and participate with them as they went about their lives?
What a treasure-trove of unknown unknowns would we confront!
