Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe

by Wen Stephenson

In these hard-hitting and deeply personal essays,  Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes.



After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.



Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle. Throughout, he poses a question that resonates for many on the left If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?



Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cheap hope, but with something a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.

Genres: Nonfiction

229 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 24, 2025

Reviews

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This would seem to be Camus’s most basic gut check. He would simply have us ask ourselves, engaging in the kind of self-questioning that Arendt saw in those who refuse to go along with evil: If I achieve these ends by these means, will I still be able to live with myself and others? Or will I have betrayed whatever it is that allows me to communicate and to live in community with other human beings?" p136

This collection of essays is for sure dark. This author writes about a terrible world, this world. He braces himself and us, but he does turn to stare into the abyss.

I didn't take any notes on this one because I was processing what I read long after I read it. This collection gathers weight as it goes, and by the end I was in awe of the weight, and so very ready to put it down.

I read this all at once, which I don't recommend lol! I wish I had spread it out over a week. If you read it all at once, expect a book hangover ☕

Despite it being a total mood killer for me, I have to say I found the essays realistic and passionately presented. This is a political book, by nature, and it will draw mixed reviews, I predict. I think it's fine work, and from an author who wants to make things better. So I recommend it to readers who like political books, books about major threats to human civilization, like climate instability, and books about hope.

Thank you to the Wen Stephenson, Haymarket Books, and NetGalley for an advance digital arc of LEARNING TO LIVE IN THE DARK. I found an accessible digital copy on Libby, this the late review. All views are mine.

[Mel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm extremely disappointed I wasted so much time on this book. The author self-identifies as "a white, straight, cisgender man... with a working class, rural Texas, evangelical Christian background" and acknowledges he has "privilege" BUT GUYS THAT DOESN’T DEFINE HIM 🙄

Anyways, this book did not need to be written and this white guy's lukewarm takes on revolution do not need to be platformed. I actually found the first few essays interesting, but things quickly unraveled. First, there is a whole chapter on Camus centering a French settler colonialist's feelings about occupied Algeria... and it is rough read 🙄 Next, we have the preoccupation with nonviolent resistance, which Stephenson admits completely failed to enact real change. So what does the author recommend... ESCALATED nonviolent resistance 🤡 And finally, his half-baked essay on Gaza that he thinks he deserves to write because he went to a protest and said 'from the river to the sea'. This man is a normalizing zionist sympathizer content to spout the occupation's talking points. I had to stop reading this chapter a few pages in. The author blames the resistance for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who are dead, not the genocidal settler colonial state of Israel.

Please, Wen Stephenson, sit down and start listening to the most marginalized. How dare you speak for Gazans, who are still being bombarded and starved to death by Israel, at the publishing of your book. It is clear you are not speaking to anyone on the ground in Gaza.

Haymarket books, this was a massive disappointment.

[Lukas Wierer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A number of really interesting readings, but they don't necessarily work well together.

It felt really disjointed, but maybe that was because how long i took to read it. Not sure.

[Meghan Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wen Stephenson’s frustration and search for answers, amid a declining US democracy and the global climate crisis, echoes close to my heart. By revisiting historical thought leaders, revolutionaries, and poets, he attempts to make sense of the way forward. Seriously, what do we do guys?!? But, I find deep companionship in reading works like this, that so many of us with a sense of morality and justice, are not alone. Thank you, Haymarket Books forever and always.