What moral flows from this? Maybe none.
But what really flows is quickly-drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.
          —Wisława Szymborska, “Reality Demands”

The landscape is legend, each valley and hill the stuff of myth. Here, below the tombs that honeycomb the cliffs of Lycia’s second- largest city, Pinara, says the Iliad, roamed the raging Chimaera, “a bane to many men.” There, in the port city of Patara, Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas of Myra, was born. Shh, listen: there sings the Odyssey’s “daughter of Pandareus, the nightingale of the greenwood . . . as she sits perched amid the thick leafage of the trees, and with many trilling notes pours forth her rich voice in wailing for her child.” And there, in an amphitheater facing the Mediterranean Sea and built to seat four thousand men, the public of Antiphellos watched plays about gods and mortals—until god Poseidon himself, the Earth Shaker, unleashed a deadly spectacle that metamorphosed Antiphellos and dozens of Lycian towns into bygones. Today, we know this act of god as the 141/142 Lycian Earthquake.

“How angry was Poseidon in 141/142 AD?” asked a paper that geological engineering researchers from Turkey presented at the annual general assembly of the European Geosciences Union in 2017. Very angry. The researchers established that the earthquake was one of the most destructive natural disasters in the region ever, “bigger or equal” to magnitude 8 on the Richter scale—more likely, they estimated, it “at least had 9-10 intensity.” It unleashed a tsunami that devastated Patara and Antiphellos and reconfigured the Lycian coastline, choked ports with alluvium, turned seafronts to swamps. In Patara, the lighthouse that once warned mariners they were approaching the coast now stands 1,800 feet inland.

My family gathered in Lycia in April 2023. It was our first time together in four years; my parents, sister, and nephew live in Russia, my child and I live in the United States, and we had been kept apart—first by the Covid pandemic, then by Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the consequent travel restrictions on Russian passport holders. The combination of the years of missing, of my dread for my family’s safety in a totalitarian state, and of the apprehension that borders could close for good, pressed us to focus on the simple beauty of sharing space. And what a gorgeous space it was! We went on family hikes in the marble ruins around Antiphellos and studied turtles beneath the trilingual stele at Xanthus. In the rich amphitheater of polished marble at Pinara, we contemplated the passage of time and posed for a family photograph: here’s a city built no later than the fifth century before the common era, sacked by Alexander the Great in 343 BCE, mangled by the Lycian earthquake 400 years later; and then here is us, born in 1952, 1975, 1988, 1997, 2017, juxtaposing our smiling faces against the ungraspable strata of ancient suffering, sending our love.

  
How strange was it to punch into the GPS storied sites of an ancient catastrophe? Not so strange at all; we have been sightseeing the scenes of past catastrophes—disasters natural and humanmade— for ages, and with great gusto. Sir Charles Fellows, the British explorer whose 1838 journey to Asia Minor paved the way to the wholesale looting of Lycian antiquities by the British Crown (there might be more artifacts from Xanthus at the British Museum than in Xanthus itself), described the town’s earthquake-shattered tombs as “extremely romantic, upon beautiful hills. . . . On the west the view is bounded by the picturesquely formed but bare range of Mount Cragus, and on the east by the mountain chain extending to Patara. A rich plain, with its meandering river, carries the eye to the horizon of the sea towards the south-west.” It is the romantic tombs upon beautiful hills that my parents, my sister, my nephew, my child, and I set out to see, that April, day after day. A happy, war-torn lot in a small, white, rental minivan. Because no one else seemed to remember how to drive stick, I was the driver. But before merging onto the highway toward old ruins, I had to navigate the steep, narrow streets of the coastal town where we stayed, which was sheltering hundreds of people displaced by a much more recent, magnitude 7.8 earthquake, one that had killed more than 55,000 people and wounded at least 10,000 in eastern Turkey and Syria only two months earlier. You could tell the refugees by the way they dressed, especially the women, their modest abayas at odds with the knee-length pencil skirts and décolletés of Kalkan. Amidst the heavy-smoking, beer-drinking townsfolk, their tentative gait—as if they no longer trusted that the earth would not lurch underfoot— reminded us: that earthquake was not myth, it was real and raw, a still-felt shudder in all of our bones.

  
A myth, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” A natural or social phenomenon such as an earthquake, or a genocide, or another mass extinction event, the extent of which is beyond our human ken. In W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the narrator recalls standing inside the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo a century and a half after the battle and trying to comprehend the scope of past suffering: “We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” How long does it take for mass death to become myth? How does the myth-making of mass loss of life remove us from the realness of that loss, and, in so doing, how does it inure us overall to manmade or nature-made violence and the suffering it causes? The philosopher Gillian Rose contemplated these questions when she acted as one of the consultants to the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz, which she called “a deeply equivocal nomenclature.” After the Cold War ended and the oversight of the concentration camp shifted from the Soviet Union, which borderline denied Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, to newly ideologically independent Poland, Rose was one of the thinkers tasked with envisioning the new commemorative site.

Today, Auschwitz, with its horrendous displays of shoes, of children’s clothes, of shorn and confiscated human hair, is a kind of panorama: it both centers wickedness and reduces it to its attributes. Everything there stands for something else. Our ability to substitute one thing for another—what neuroscientists call cognitive capacity for symbolic representation—is the evolutionary development that gave us language, gave us poetry: in a way, it made us human. And look at us, a race of poets. The camp has become the symbol of the Holocaust, which has become the symbol of fascism; the gate—not even the entire gate but its header, Arbeit Macht Frei, itself the symbol of the gate—has become the symbol of the gas chambers, which have become the symbol of evil. Even the term, the Holocaust—used in Greek translations of the Torah for the Hebrew word olah, and employed by twelfth-century archivists to describe the massacre of Jews during the 1189 coronation ceremony of England’s Richard I, but also, in 1895, in a New York Times headline about a massacre of Armenians in northeastern Turkey—refers us back to mythology, because olah (or holokauston in Greek) describes a burnt sacrifice offered in its entirety to God. The choice of the word itself hints at the involvement of the supernatural.

“To name the Nazi genocide ‘the Holocaust,’” warns Rose, “is already to over-unify it and to sacralize it, to see it as providential purpose.” We have reduced monumental cruelty to its essence—to its “mythic meaning,” in Rose’s words. This was why, after all, I, too, had traveled to Auschwitz in 2019, soon after seeing my family one last time before our reunion in Turkey, and after a lifetime of trying to find footing in the totality of the world’s grief and beauty: because, as a Soviet Jew born in the 1970s, I was raised with the Holocaust as part of my origin myth; because Auschwitz is its symbol; because before the woundlike twenty-first-century refugee camps and caravans of the displaced slogging through ankle-deep muck and migrant boats that capsize to feed human bodies to the carnivorous pathless sea and other-speaking children in cages, before all the gaping modern horror, the silence, the opaque foggy muteness, had already set in—there. And there it had already been comfortably enshrined. How difficult we find it to honor each life on its own terms, to acknowledge it as precious and singular—to acknowledge that we are precious and singular, who have endured a multimillion-year-old history of fear and loss and despair and still remember how to mourn. Maybe it is part of our denial in our culpability for death. Maybe it is part of our stubborn denial of death. Maybe our minds still hark back to Eden, where we were immortal like gods, invincible like children.

When the earthquake struck Syria and Turkey on February 6, 2023, I fell into a sad, subdued rage. The earth shivers and more than 55,000 people are dead—and still the rest of us manage to kill and harm and dismiss one another on her unreliable crust: how can it be? How can it be? My bewilderment was an aftershock of the grief I had felt after the first, worst year of the pandemic: a biblical devastation was sent upon humankind, and yet in our ruthlessness, in what Rose calls our “despairing rationalism without reason,” we did not use that dreadful wakeup call to reassess how we treat one another.

Perhaps the ancients were onto something when they ascribed natural disasters to a god’s wrath. In the Iliad, Greeks kill Hector and sack Troy but fail to sacrifice properly to the gods; in response, Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon conspire to send a tsunami onto the wall that the Greeks built. Describing the tsunami of 479 BCE that killed a Persian army advancing on the Greek Potidaea, Herodotus writes: “[t]he Potidaeans say that the cause of the high sea and flood and the Persian disaster lay in the fact that those same Persians who now perished in the sea had profaned the temple and the image of Poseidon which was in the suburb of the city. I think that in saying that this was the cause they are correct.” (According to Plato, the Atlanteans, too, were punished for their greed and cruelty.) To writers, this makes complete sense. Here is Ocean Vuong: “Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response.”

At some point in history, gods, or God, were behind earthquakes the world over. The Qur’an’s Surah 99, about Doomsday, is called simply The Earthquake, Az-Zalzalah: “When the Earth is shaken to its (utmost) convulsion, and the Earth throws up its burdens (from within), and man cries (distressed); ‘What is the matter with it?’—on that Day will it declare its tidings: for that thy Lord will have given its inspiration.” When my family and I traveled to Xanthus and Pinara, we visited former ends of the world.

In 350 BCE, Aristotle passed his verdict on earthquakes and tsunamis: not caused by gods. He wrote in Meteorologica that “[t]he combination of a tidal wave with an earthquake is due to the presence of contrary winds,” which shake the earth and push the sea back and forth. By demythologizing—by desacralizing—this act of god, Aristotle also absolved heedless humans of responsibility for natural disasters. Twenty-four hundred years later, as we spiral deeper into man-made climate catastrophe, I wish he’d worked harder to hold us to account.

At the same time, then as now, the divine provenance of disaster had not forced us to act with greater care toward one another. A friend of mine wonders if these things aren’t closely linked—if we aren’t avoiding our vulnerabilities in the face of nature by fighting human wars.

If fear of gods’ wrath was not enough to make the Atlanteans change their cruel ways, why would it be enough for us now?

~

After many years of documenting the human condition, including wars on several continents, I try not to watch reels from sites of natural disasters or war zones for the same reason I try not to watch reels of lynchings of Black people by police officers: I can imagine exactly what they look like, which means that watching, for me, feels voyeuristic. (Rose warned that a visitor to Auschwitz the museum would become a voyeur, just as we all become voyeurs when we read news articles about unfolding tragedies, or myths about great cataclysms of yore.) But I did see, in February 2023, a drone footage of tall apartment buildings in eastern Turkey fallen on their sides, like cards or dominoes, and it was so unbearable to watch, so devastating, that immediately my writer’s brain began to write myth around it, so that what I saw in that terrible footage was a god’s indifferent or vindictive finger reaching down from heaven to knock the buildings over.

I cannot tell the same story about the manmade violence I witness. I cannot, for example, come up with any story that rationalizes the genocide in Palestine, where the government of Israel is killing people at a mythic rate. Maybe, decades hence, some future writer will. This, I guess, is the difference between natural and humanmade disasters: the ones we cause require more time to become myth.

  
“This work at Auschwitz,” writes Rose, “‘the future of Auschwitz,’ raises in an acutely direct and practical way the question of the relation between knowledge and power. Are our attempts at independent critical reflection merely another stage in the culture industry which Auschwitz has become?”

Look, now, where this “culture industry,” this over-sacralization, has brought us: to an Israeli ambassador wearing a yellow Star of David patch—a symbol the Nazis used to identify Jews—during an address to the Security Council of the United Nations—an organization whose first human rights treaty was the Genocide Convention of 1948—to justify Israel’s own latest act of genocide against Palestinians.

Therein lies the cyclical nature of suffering we endure and unleash: it is as if the very existence of the myth proves to us that we can survive it again. Think of the six of us in Lycia—mom, dad, sister, nephew, child, me—wading to waterfalls ankle-deep through cold river gorges. And everywhere fields of rapeseed flowers and poppies, and garlands of bougainvillea and wisteria, and ripe lemons on trees, and the scent—the scent—the scent of tangerines in bloom!

  
Is making myth of suffering good or bad? The double-edged power of a narrative extends beyond accounts of ignominy and catastrophe. All storytelling is magic. It can cast spells. It affects lives in profound and unpredictable ways. Maybe it even begets lives, like Bruce Chatwin’s po.esis that mapped the existence of things and determined their being. Its faculty underlies the authority of griots and court jesters everywhere, the pervasive public fear of their transcendent skill.

“They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged,” wrote Tadeusz Borowski about the possibility of Hitler winning World War II. “They will murder our children. And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.” But do we not produce religion daily, erasing the real increments of suffering? Borowski, a journalist, a Pole, a Catholic, and a deputy Kapo, survived Auschwitz, but killed himself in 1951, at the age of twenty-eight.

And here is Jean Améry: “I do not have [clarity] today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history. My book is meant to prevent precisely this. For nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no remembering has become mere memory.” Améry, a Jew, survived Auschwitz but killed himself in 1978, at age sixty-five. Is it accurate to say that these two men, these chroniclers of suffering who resisted making mass murder into myth, survived Auschwitz? Must we mythologize suffering to survive it?

Joseph Stalin, a dictator and butcher from my homeland, said: “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic.” A statistic, I think, is a modern word for mythmaking, a way to neatly package a tragedy into an impersonal story that numbers tell. How to avoid it, for example, as we think of the people killed in earthquakes, in floods; as the death toll in Gaza climbs and climbs?

Annie Dillard suggests: “simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply” by, in this case, the latest death toll.

“See?” she writes. “Nothing to it.”

  
About googling sites of catastrophes. When I visited Auschwitz, I used my GPS to find the entrance to the camp from my Oswiecim lodgings. And before then, still preparing for my trip in the United States, I’d used my Airbnb app to find my lodgings. The place was listed as Private Apartment 200 m to Auschwitz Birkenau. (The Airbnb listing acknowledged that past human suffering was the town’s main modern-day attraction; but how many millions have pilgrimed to the Holy Land since the Naqba without giving it a thought?) It was on the third floor of a residential complex built at the same time and on the same grid as the artillery barracks that eventually would be converted into the prisoner blocks of Auschwitz I. In fact, it once had been a part of the same sprawl of barracks; you could tell from the satellite images in which the apartment complex and the death camp next to it looked exactly the same, except the barracks in which I stayed were politely stuccoed and the ones at the extermination camp were not. The third floor may have been a later addition.

On its list of amenities, Private Apartment 200 m to Auschwitz Birkenau specified: no smoke detector, no carbon monoxide alarm. I emailed a friend about it and she wrote back: “Wow. If you put that smoke detector detail in a story, a reader would rightly call foul.”

I thought I had begun work on this essay last April, while with my family in Lycia. But a few months later, digging through my notes from the last decade, I saw that I had been thinking about how we use narrative to tame disaster for many years. (I imagine humans have been thinking about this for millennia.) Suddenly, I was writing a narrative about catastrophes while writing about narratives about catastrophes. And then the Atlas Mountains in Morocco shrugged with a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, and a flood in Libya took thousands of lives, and I found it very difficult to write about catastrophes, or to write about writing about them. And when a poet friend posted photographs from Pompeii, I, who grew up on images and stories about the city as part of my very classics-focused Leningrad upbringing, for whom the narrative of Mount Vesuvius erupting in 79 CE, sanitized and long-devoid of its human toll, was part of foundational narrative—all I could see was dead people. I knew this was my war-earned PTSD accelerating, as it often does as people age, but still, this turn of things shook me with a new urgency to write while I still could, because I could see now that at some point I would probably be forced to stop. (“I realized the fabulous extent of my luck,” the actor-narrator says in James Baldwin’s novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. “I could, I could, if I kept the faith, transform my sorrow into life and joy. I might live in pain and sorrow forever, but, if I kept the faith, I would never be useless.”) But, as the death toll in Morocco and Libya climbed daily, I couldn’t write. I could do little more than shake my impotent fist at the sky.

  
The title character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello proposes that broadcast violence is obscene “because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one’s sanity.” Years ago, when I first read this passage, I interpreted it as a prohibition against documenting violence. Maybe a true writer of conscience, I had thought with moral dread, is one who never puts down a single word. Now I see that it is the last clause—if one wishes to save one’s sanity—that is the key to deciphering the quote: Why must we save our sanity, who said we ought to stay sane, how is it even decent to remain sane in this insane world we are so recklessly and callously deranging?

It is a kind of madness to always hear the keening of the dead, this hurt canticle. It is a madness not to hear.

  
Tragedy can become an attraction; the site of exodus can become a sanctuary. A month before visiting Auschwitz I came to Cologne, to speak at a conference. From my hotel on Ringstraße, I walked the four miles to Müngersdorf, a neighborhood west of the city center. The German government operated a concentration camp in Müngersdorf between 1941 and 1943, inside the former barracks called Fort V, where it processed approximately 8,000 of Cologne’s Jews—those who had not evacuated in time—for deportation, by train, to extermination camps in Eastern Europe: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Fort V was a convenient distance to a railroad depot.

By the time Cologne was mostly done destroying her Jewry, in 1943, the Royal Air Force was mostly done destroying Cologne, and had killed 20,000 of her people. The stated purpose of those air raids, eighty years ago, was to demolish the “morale of the enemy civilian population.” In the largest bombing sortie of the Second World War, on one May night in 1942, a coordinated attack by one thousand and forty-six British bombers—one warplane for every six hundred residents—dropped on Cologne fifteen hundred metric tons of incendiary bombs, a bomb every second for an hour and a half, flattening most of the city center and leaving 45,000 people without homes.

The 1880 Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook for Holland, Belgium, and the Rhine mentions the Müngersdorf depot, describing the “fine panorama of Cologne” a tourist could see from it. The depot is no more, and where the barracks once stood there is now a sequence of parks and sports facilities. Fort V was leveled in 1962. Cologne city government inaugurated in its place a rock with a memorial plate in 1981. A broad tarmacked path for cyclists and joggers and parents with strollers cuts through the former concentration camp and past the rock, past the elevated outlines of a fort on the west side and beyond them, a stable, a soccer field, and a playground. Nettles grow around the rock. I knelt in the nettles, I placed a rock on the rock. Behind me, someone was kicking a soccer ball: the same hollow p’gung . . . p’gung . . . p’gung that I had heard in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the North Caucasus, in Somalia, in Mali, in Palestine. Soccer is the world’s most popular agon, a way of life for billions of people, like armed conflict.

Before I left the park, I spotted a tiny blue shard of glass in the nettles. I picked it up and photographed it, and sent the photo to the writer Eduardo Halfon, whose prose exposes and explores the cracks in our human surface. Eduardo wrote back:

“Beautiful. But what is it?”

What is it? A tear a heartbreak a memento a symbol a token something left behind something found.

  
What does an ancient ruin tell us? That out of great suffering rises great beauty, over time, sometimes. (“Some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art,” writes Ocean Vuong.) Is there consolation in that? I don’t know.

I am becoming, in the realest of times, a beautiful ruin.

~

The new Cologne has retained the radial street layout of the ancient Roman city—Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, or simply Colonia—but most of the houses that flank her roads are modern, built after the war. This lends the city an eerie feel of an impostor, her architecture a masquerading Hellequin’s Horde that will vanish once the spell has lifted. Her sidewalks are cobbled with what they call here Stolpersteine, stumbling stones: brass plaques just under four inches square, each engraved with the name and circumstances of a Jew banished by the Nazis. Stolpersteine exist in many cities in Europe; they are the largest decentralized memorial in the world. One plaque here. Two there. Four there. The origin of the name, and of the concept, comes from an antisemitic German execration that someone— presumably, a Gentile—might utter when they stumble out of the blue: Hier könnte ein Jude begraben zein. A Jew could be buried here.

The Stolpersteine are set in front of the houses where the victims had last lived freely. On each of the plaques I saw, after the name of the person in whose memory it was installed came the word deportiert: deported. The Stolpersteine commemorate a removal. I imagine plaques in front of the each of the crumbled apartment buildings in Diyarbakir. Small markers in the mud of Derna. The last Barcelona home of the man I once saw on a plane to Dakar, being forcibly deported to Senegal. A little shiny plate for each of the people deported from the United States; if the country were to mark the removals it executed in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it would need approximately six million markers—the same number as the peasants and ethnic minorities Stalin deported between 1930 and 1953, the same number as the Jews killed in the Shoah. So much of the Americas, indeed, would be so tiled to mark the forced colonial removals of their Native peoples. I imagine the way, in the cold corner of the world where I grew up, pine needles palliating the Karelian middens of First Nations people—the Izhora, the Veps, the Votians—would eddy around a brass mosaic; the way each metal tessera would wink when the wind bends the tree crowns. The Holy Land would be paved so many times over—plate over plate over plate to mark the Crusades, the Naqba, the methodical and ongoing bulldozing of Palestinian homes to make room for Israeli settlers; the colossal and ongoing crime against humanity in Gaza; the horrific uprooting that, let’s face it, is likely yet to come— that when it’s done, the armored desert would glare at the indifferent sky with mythic brightness approaching the sun itself.