My life might have been very different. If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view. If only I’d packed up early enough, as some did, and left the country—the country that I still foolishly thought was the same as the country to which I had for so many years belonged. Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

In that vanished country of mine, things had been on a downward spiral for years. The floods, the fires, the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the droughts, the water shortages, the earthquakes. Too much of this, too little of that. The decaying infrastructure—why hadn’t someone decommissioned those atomic reactors before it was too late? The tanking economy, the joblessness, the falling birth rate. People became frightened. Then they became angry. The absence of viable remedies. The search for someone to blame. Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we’d been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

“The Testaments: A Novel,” by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood writes with powerful prose that carries a vivid warning. In this novel, she looks at a dysfunctional world that crumbles under the weight of irrational despair. “The search for someone to blame”? She hints we should not look farther than ourselves: “Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we’d been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.” But the author has already answered her question: “People became frightened. Then they became angry.” Fear and anger: the biggest enemies of man’s rational behavior.