Page 12 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

It’s a good poem, but it only works because cummings situates the observation in childhood, when one is presumably too innocent to have yet realized how lame it is to write about sunsets. And yet, a good sunset is beautiful, and better still, universally so. Our distant ancestors didn’t eat like us or travel like us. Their relationship to ideas as fundamental as time was different from ours. They measured time not primarily in hours or seconds but mostly in relationship to solar cycles—how close it was to sunset, or to daybreak, or to midwinter. But every human who has lived for more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light.

So how might we celebrate a sunset without being mawkish or saccharine? Maybe state it in cold facts. Here’s what happens: Before a beam of sunlight gets to your eyes, it has many, many interactions with molecules that cause the so-called scattering of light. Different wavelengths are sent off in different directions when interacting with, say, oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere. But at sunset, the light travels through the atmosphere longer before it reaches us, so that much of the blue and purple has been scattered away, leaving the sky to our eyes rich in reds and pinks and oranges. As the artist Tacita Dean put it, “Color is a fiction of light.”

I think it’s helpful to know how sunsets work. I don’t buy the romantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty, but I still can’t find language to describe how breathtakingly beautiful sunsets are—not breathtakingly, actually, but breath-givingly beautiful. All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between day and night, I’m stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness. You’d think that would be sad, but it isn’t. It only makes me grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” So what can we say of the clichéd beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough.

My dog, Willy, died a few years ago, but one of my great memories of him is watching him play in the front yard of our house at dusk. He was a puppy then, and in the early evenings he would contract a case of the zoomies. He ran in delighted circles around us, yipping and jumping at nothing in particular, and then after a while, he’d get tired, and he’d run over to me and lie down. And then he would do something absolutely extraordinary: He would roll over onto his back, and present his soft belly. I always marveled at the courage of that, his ability to be so absolutely vulnerable to us. He offered us the place ribs don’t protect, trusting that we weren’t going to bite or stab him. It’s hard to trust the world like that, to show it your belly. There’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world.

I’m scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I’m hit where I am earnest, I will never recover.

It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I’m just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass.

But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, “To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.” I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.

And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself: This doesn’t look like a picture. And it doesn’t look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you’ve been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That’s bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunsets five stars.

JERZY DUDEK’S PERFORMANCE ON MAY 25, 2005

I’D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY of joy and wonder and stupidity. It’s a sports story, and I’ve been thinking about it because I am writing to you from May 2020, a moment when sports have—for the first time in my life—stopped.

I miss sports. I know sports don’t matter in the scheme of things, but I miss the luxury of caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. The late Pope John Paul II is reported (probably falsely) to have said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” And I yearn for the unimportant things at the moment. So here is a football story that begins in southern Poland, only about sixty miles from where Pope John Paul II was born.

It’s 1984, and a gangly ten-year-old coal miner’s son named Jerzy Dudek is living in the tiny coal mining town of Szczygłowice. The mining company has organized a trip for miners’ spouses to go underground and see where the miners work. Jerzy and his older brother, Dariusz, wait outside the mine with their father, as Renata Dudek journeys thousands of feet down into the mineshaft. When she returns, she starts kissing her husband, crying. Dudek would later recall, “She called us over and said, ‘Jerzy, Dariusz, promise me you will never go down the mine.’”

Jerzy and his brother just laughed. “We were thinking to ourselves, ‘Well, what else are we going to do?’”

By then, Pope John Paul II, whom young Jerzy idolized, was living in the Vatican, a couple of miles away from Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, which that year hosted the finals of the European Cup, a big soccer tournament now known as the Champions League, where all the best teams in Europe play one another. That year, the final pitted hometown club AS Roma against my beloved Liverpool Football Club.*

Liverpool’s goalkeeper at the time, Bruce Grobbelaar, was eccentric even by goalie standards. He warmed up by walking on his hands and hanging off the top of the goal. He often drank a dozen beers on the team bus after a Liverpool loss.

But Grobbelaar is best known for that European Cup final in 1984. The game went to a penalty shoot-out in which, for some reason, Grobbelaar decided to feign wobbly-legged nervousness as one of the Roma penalty takers ran up to shoot. Put off by Grobbelaar’s spaghetti legs, the Roma player skyed his shot over the crossbar and Liverpool won their fourth European Cup.

Back in southern Poland, young Jerzy Dudek loved football, although leather balls were hard to come by in his impoverished community, so they usually played with rubber balls or even old tennis balls. He ended up becoming a goalkeeper because he was tall, but he didn’t start out especially skilled at the position. His first coach told him, “You dive like a sack of potatoes.”

By seventeen, Dudek was in training to become a miner, and as part of his vocational training, he worked in the coal mine two days a week. In many ways, he liked the work. He enjoyed the camaraderie in the mine, the feeling of mutual reliance. The mine company had a football team, and Jerzy began playing for them. He couldn’t afford goalie gloves, so he wore his father’s work gloves. To make himself feel like a real goalie, he drew an Adidas logo on them. He got better, stopped diving like a sack of potatoes, and by the age of nineteen, he was making just over a hundred dollars a month as the goalkeeper for a semipro team while still working for the mine company. But by twenty-one, his progress had stalled. He would later say that he felt himself melting “into the grayness.”

Liverpool Football Club were melting into the grayness, too. By the 1990s, Liverpool often weren’t good enough to play in the Champions League, let alone win it.

In 1996, when Jerzy Dudek was twenty-two, he caught the attention of a first-division Polish team, who signed him to play for a salary of around $400 a month. After that, Dudek’s rise was astonishing: Within six months, he was transferred to a Dutch team, Feyenoord, where he finally began to make a living wage playing goalie. After a few years with Feyenoord, Dudek signed a multimillion-pound contract with Liverpool.

But he was miserable. Of the time, he wrote, “The first few days in Liverpool were the worst ones of my life. I felt really lonely. I was in a new place with a new language, which I couldn’t speak.” All these quotes, by the way, are from Dudek’s autobiography, which he titled, A Big Pole in Our Goal. That’s the song Liverpool fans sang about him, to the tune of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” We’ve got a big Pole in our goal.

Before we get to May 25, 2005, I just want to note one more thing. Professional goalkeepers spend a lot of time practicing trying to save penalty kicks. Jerzy Dudek had faced thousands of penalty kicks, and he approached them in precisely the same way: He stood stock-still in the middle of the goal until a moment before the ball was kicked, and then he dove one way or another. Always. Without exception.

The 2004–2005 season saw Liverpool go on a magical run through the Champions League, and by April they were preparing to play the famed Italian club Juventus in the quarterfinals when Pope John Paul II died. Dudek ended up on the bench for that game—he couldn’t think straight after the death of his childhood hero and found himself near tears as he confessed to the team doctor that he couldn’t play that night. Liverpool won the game nonetheless, and eventually made their way to the Champions League final, where they would play another Italian giant, AC Milan.

The final was played in Istanbul, and it began horribly for Dudek and Liverpool. Fifty-one seconds into the game, Milan scored. They scored two more goals just before halftime. Dudek’s wife, Mirella, at home in Poland preparing for their son’s first communion, recalled a “deathly silence” descending over Szczygłowice.

Of the Liverpool locker room at halftime, Dudek wrote, “Everyone was broken.” Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher said, “My dreams had turned to dust.” The players could hear the forty thousand Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the stands above, but they knew it was, as Carragher put it, “in sympathy more than belief.”

The rest I know by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times. Nine minutes after the second half begins, Liverpool’s captain Steven Gerrard scores with a balletic header. Liverpool score again two minutes later, and then again four minutes after that. Now it’s tied 3–3. The match goes into thirty minutes of extra time. Milan pour on the pressure. It is so obvious that they are the better team. Liverpool’s players are exhausted, just hoping to get to a penalty shoot-out.

And then: With ninety seconds left in extra time, Jerzy Dudek makes a double save on two point-blank shots that occur within a second of each other. The save is so good that an entire chapter of A Big Pole in Our Goal is devoted to it. The save is so good that even now, fifteen years later, when I see replays of it, I still think the Milan player is going to score. But instead, Jerzy Dudek makes the save every time, and the game goes to a penalty shoot-out.

So you’re Jerzy Dudek. You’ve been practicing saving penalties since you were a kid, and you have your way of doing it. You’ve lain awake at night imagining this moment. The Champions League final, down to penalties, you in goal, standing stock-still until the moment before the ball is kicked.