Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 133

and grief themselves without reserve —and discover that by doing so they
subtly change: through embracing trauma more fully we can accept the
broken world without being haunted and distressed by it; and through
submiting fully to grief, even a grief for grief itself, we might ind how
to relinquish our atachment to recovery, accepting instead a serenity in
destitution. By owning disaster in these and other ways, we might relin-
quish that fidelity to a sense of our innocence and that belief in the valid-
ity of our culture which made the shatering of both so painful. hrough
that process, we may at last lay hold of a new foundation—one so radical
that on its basis we may endure whatever may come. On the other side
of a mutilated happiness we might discover vaster possibilities, including
a capacity for affirmation without limit and a power to love without the
hope of return.
In discovering that we may persist in doing justice even in the ruins,
we can find the basis for an ethical optimism that can survive even in
the midst of uter defeat. We need not fear, now or later, that political
or climatological realities will cancel our capacity to follow through on
our responsibility to others and to the forms of life that have sustained
us. By working through the series of potential ethical challenges to the
biter end, by imagining the worst that may befall—and inding that we
can survive even that horror with integrity—we discover an indestruc-
tible ethical agency we may never have known we possessed, discerning
hints of possibility that lie unremarked within the impossible challenges
of our era, sources of strength that will remain to us even if the future
disappears. Through that same encounter with the worst, we learn how
to dwell with the full range, however painful, of emotions that arise in
response to the dilemmas of our time, at last overcoming the dissociation
habitual to our culture.
Bringing these discoveries with us back from this hypothetical future
to our own moment, when we cannot yet be certain that all action is
futile or that the future has uterly disappeared, we may realize that we
can make good even now on the agency we have gained through this
foray into the future and as a result can face our present difficulties with
a surprising authority. Moreover, by returning to the present in this way,
we expand the significance of that future ethical decision outward, to
include our own present as well. But by assuming responsibility today