June 26, 2025

In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, by James Cairns

I have trouble with understanding things, with understanding proportion. As someone with anxiety, I tend towards catastrophic thinking anyway, and so I get confused with how the media reports such things, how it all gets compounded. An example, say, like Covid, which came along with the most infectious variant ever, and then the one after that which was even more infectious, and then one that 20 times more infectious, and that was around the time my brain broke into bits, because how is that even possible?

What does it mean when everything everywhere is a crisis? James Cairns’ essay collection In Crisis, On Crisis is an effort to answer that question, and belongs to a genre of literature from which I’ve been finding answers this spring, and includes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theories of Water and The Snag, by Tessa McWatt. There was a time, a little under a decade ago, when people who marching around holding signs that said, “I WANT YOU TO PANIC,” and let me tell you, I did what they said, but all I got was a mental breakdown. And so what I’m looking for these days are stories for how we can still live rich and meaningful lives in this moment, while envisioning possibilities for a different kind of future.

These essays by Cairns—a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and also a socialist—are a fascinating blending of personal, cultural, and scholarly, many of his broader ideas about living amidst crisis underlined by his experience as someone who lives with addiction, someone who has relapsed and recovered in the past, and could very well do so again: “The fact is, I’m not going to drink today. And if I relapse tomorrow or ten months from now, I have experience and supports to get me through it. It won’t necessarily mean my life is ruined. But it might. There is no curing, no transcending my alcoholism./ This is a crisis. This is not a crisis.”

How do we live knowing that bad things can happen? How do we live knowing that bad things will happen? In these essays—which delve into Trumpism, apocalyptic reading, whether we are in fact living through a crisis of democracy, midlife crises and Karl Ove Knausgaard, fatalism and Sylvia Plath, the experience of moving during a pandemic, if now is a “post-truth” moment, fears and anxieties about his children and their futures in the face of the climate crisis—Cairns delves deep into these questions and urges the reader to leave room for possibility.