Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction from the perspectives of past, present, and future.

Our third installment, the Basilisk, is from Paul Kingsnorth, a writer and poet living in rural

Ireland.

Paul is the author of the novels The Wake and Beast, the essay collection, Confessions

of a Recovering Environmentalist, and his latest book of nonfiction, Savage Gods.

Narrated by Paul, the basilisk is an exchange of letters between an uncle and a niece.

In it, Paul imagines how two members of a family might respond to our addiction to technology as they divulge their thoughts about the other world, possession, and fatal temptation.

My dear Bridget, I would not normally write to you in this way. I would not normally write to anyone in this way. I gave up writing letters some years ago after my correspondence mostly stopped

replying. When one of my friends sent me a two-line text message in response to a five-page

handwritten letter, and to add insult to injury it even had one of those smiley-faced things on the

end, but then I knew the game was up. I am not convinced that people even know how to write letters

anymore, or even to read them. I won't bore you with the facts about the measurable decline in our

ability to concentrate over the past decade. You, of all people, know what the screens are doing

to our minds. And that, as you might already have guessed, is the subject of this letter.

It will be a long letter, but I beg you to bear with it. Do not skim it. Sit down and read it

carefully. You may know why I am writing, but you do not know what I am going to say. And this is

why you must, you must, Bridget, read this letter right through to the end,

and you must make the effort to take it seriously. However hard it may seem for you at times,

when it gets hard, if it begins to seem ridiculous, well, I will ask you to indulge me.

...