HE title comes from a story in an old Robert Silverberg fantasy novel, an unmemorable book except for this particular line, describing the reaction of an impossibly old farm matron (as I recall, she is of some reptilian species) watching an unstoppable plague destroy her crops: “She knew she had lived a year too long. She had lived to see the end of the world.”

It is difficult at this point to disagree with the imaginary lizard-lady.

The pandemic alone has wrecked many lives — quite literally for the 4.1 million around the world and almost 2W,000 in this country alone who have died from it. Personally, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I have only been financially ruined, experienced my mental and physical health slowly degrading, and had most of the social and professional opportunities that would have defined a normal future disappear permanently. But at least

I get to wake up every morning, fix myself a good cup of coffee and watch the world burn. Many, many other people do not have it so good.

If the pandemic were not quite enough, the world is collectively experiencing one of those periods in which our environment seems to be punishing us for centuries of neglect. Massive flooding, either in unexpected places, at unexpected times or both has been banner news for a couple of weeks in Europe, in parts of the Middle East and this week, in China. As of this writing, we have witnessed three or four days of heavy rains in and around Metro Manila[ certainly, a tame experience compared with other places, but a harbinger, we fear, of things to come.

Elsewhere, there is drought[ the western United States and Canada were baked by an unprecedented heat wave a couple of weeks ago and are now suffering from severe water shortages and, not surprisingly, a return of gigantic wildfires. A story in the news this past week, as just one example of how bad things have gotten, included the shocking disclosure that Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam and which is the source of most of the drinking water and electricity for the city of Las Vegas, has dropped below the level needed to supply the power station.

People are, quite understandably, not handling the various stresses being placed on them with grace. The United States is experiencing its worst social and political conflict since its Civil War more than 150 years ago, and sadly, for many of the same reasons now as back then. The dictatorial governments of countries such as Belarus, Russia and India have dropped all pretense of subtlety in dealing with dissent, openly engaging in oppression and intimidation. The military government of Myanmar has evidently decided to co-opt the out-of-control pandemic in its country to conduct a pogrom against resisters to its rule — who include practically everyone not already a part of the military — arresting doctors and other health care workers and preventing people from receiving treatment for coronavirus infections. Destructive protests against governments, for one reason or another, recently wracked South Africa, Cuba and a dozen other countries.

Little wonder, then, that we try so hard to distract ourselves with inanities such as the world’s richest man riding to the edge of space in a disturbingly phallic-looking rocket ship, or the Olympic Games that no sensible person would otherwise think should be taking place right now, or beauty pageants, or the personality parade of Usual Suspects launching political campaigns, or whether Britney Spears is coherent enough to manage her own day-to-day affairs.

This kind of nihilism is not popular — it seems we have decided that our survival depends on maintaining some pretense of optimism about a future “new normal” or “next normal” — but there is a sense that many of our civilized constructs are going to snap before that brighter, post-pandemic future becomes possible. We are not going to be able to go back to what we were, at all, and we are not going to get to a place where life is productive and forward-looking again without great cost. Not just the spare change of a couple million lives lost, or a few percentage points of global GDP given away, but a tearing down of much of what we have known and consider fundamental to our ultimately unsustainable way of life.

Right now, we’re the residents of Caffa, watching the first plagueinfected corpse come flying over the walls, or the Native Americans watching the first European boat drop anchor offshore. One eventually led to a renaissance and one to a mass extinction event that’s still going on[ either way, in both cases the world as it was then known ended. And in both cases, the direction things went to was largely beyond the control of the people affected by it.

We have all lived a year too long. The best we can do now is hope that we eventually live one year long enough.