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SIGNS AND WONDERS By Delia Falconer Simon & Schuster, Essays 288pp, $32.99 Despair about the planet’s future is becoming ubiquitous. How can we fathom the accelerating changes of our planet? In these essays, Australian novelist and critic Delia Falconer searches her life for moments where the sublime expresses itself in the mundane. Signs and Wonders balances a “tragic cast of mind” with bewilderment, and a keen intimacy with the world.
According to philosopher Bruno Latour, who Falconer quotes, we are amid a “new human-made epoch” known as the Anthropocene, in which human activity becomes the driving force that shapes the natural world. Nowhere is this current crisis written about better than in the collection’s eponymic essay. “Even with so many signs in plain view,” writes Falconer, “to acknowledge the scale of this planetary distress can seem unhinged, as if one is embracing the mutterings of Nostradamus or the paranoia of a doomsday cult.” For Falconer, the planet’s growing instability bears the magnitude of an epic historical drama, with the earth experiencing a metamorphosis of mythic proportions. Anyone with some Bible reading in their past may recognise the title Signs and Wonders as an allusion to a recurring phrase in...