Like Icarus we keep flying towards the sun – and it didn’t end too well for him either.
This week temperatures in Rhodes and Athens rose again to almost 40 degrees. Yet. when I checked, Ryanair had two seats left on its Tuesday flight to Rhodes. Aer Lingus had five seats unsold for its flight to Athens the same day.
Meanwhile, any online search produced instant snapshots of Rhodes: skies blackened with smoke or glowing red with the light of multiple fires, beaches surmounted by the charred stumps of trees, scorched earth, burnt-out cars, tourists trying to sleep on the floors of schools and sports halls where they had taken refuge.
One Irish woman who took her family to Rhodes last weekend used the words “traumatised”, “freaked out”, “petrified” and “absolutely horrific” in describing to The Irish Times the ordeal that awaited them there.
In the Observer, Helena Smith wrote from Athens: “It’s mind-meltingly blistering, baking from morning to night. You struggle to sleep, you struggle to eat, you’re ill-tempered and you can’t even drink.”
The public health advice was: “Avoid coffee and alcohol, make sure older people and children are cool. Close the shutters!”
Who would want to fly into the eye of that heat storm? How sick of Irish rain and gloomy skies do you have to be to choose to travel to a place where the only safe activity is lying down in a darkened room with no coffee to wake you up and no wine to take the edge off the boredom?
It’s a Greek myth that is no longer mythic. Ovid tells us, in Book 8 of his Metamorphoses, the story of the first air travellers – Dedalus, who makes the wings of feathers and beeswax, and his son Icarus. It is a tale of how we humans can become so intoxicated by our own ingenuity that we kill our children. Icarus forgets his father’s warning that he must not fly too close to the sun.
“All this adventurous flying”, Ovid writes (in David Raeburn’s translation), “went to Icarus’s head ... he’d fallen in love with the sky”. Icarus “soared up higher and higher. The scorching rays of the sun/grew closer and softened the fragrant wax which fastened his plumage./The wax dissolved.”
The part of the Mediterranean into which he fell is still called the Icarian Sea. If you want to be close to the spot Ryanair will fly you from Dublin to Kos this weekend for €266 return.
The story is heartbreaking. Ovid tells us that the distraught father “cursed the skill of his hands and buried his dear son’s corpse in a grave”. Dedalus had inadvertently destroyed his own future.
But perhaps even more haunting now is Breugel’s great painting of the myth, in which we have to look very hard to see the tiny splash of the body as it enters the water. It is almost out of sight and certainly out of mind.
In his great poem Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden noted of the painting “how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may/Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,/ But for him it was not an important failure...” The people on the fine ship we see in the ocean “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”.
Auden wrote this in 1938, but it seems more apt than ever now. For if humanity is Icarus it is also the bystanders turning away from the disaster because we have somewhere to get to – even if that somewhere is itself a burning hellhole.
This heat is literally killing. We fly for our holidays into death zones.
In a study published this month in the scientific journal Nature Medicine an international group of epidemiologists calculated the number of people who died because of last year’s European heatwaves, which were then the worst on record. They reckon that the death toll between May and September 2022 was 61,672 people. Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal – the most popular destinations for Irish sunseekers – were the deadliest places.
It is possible to die of the heat in Ireland, of course. In fact, 26 people did so last summer. But over 3,000 died in Greece, 18,000 in Italy and 11,000 in Spain.
This, as we know, is going to get worse. As temperatures continue to rise, we can expect 68,116 heat-related deaths on average every summer in Europe by the year 2030, 94,363 deaths by 2040. and 120,610 deaths by 2050.
This is happening because of a catastrophic failure of the collective imagination. We were told very clearly decades ago about the consequences of failure to reduce carbon emissions while we had the chance to do so. We could not collectively believe in those consequences until we saw them with our own eyes – the fires, the floods, the droughts, the storms.
But now there is an even more damning question: do we even believe in what we are actually experiencing? Is seeing disbelieving? It is one thing to fail to imagine a future that scientists told us was coming. But it is quite another to be living in that future – as we most emphatically are now – and yet find it somehow incredible.
“Habit,” as Didi says in Waiting for Godot, “is a great deadener”. But this too is becoming quite literal. Our attachment to habits is killing us yet we carry on.
The sun holiday is the starkest example. We jet into the mind-melting heat because our minds are melted by habitude. Sure, you have to get away from the grey skies of Ireland – even if that means flying into the black skies of fire-stricken islands. This will stop. The summer sun holiday will become too unbearable even for us pale northern Europeans who long to bare our flesh.
But in the meantime there is too much money and too many jobs to be sacrificed – all those airlines and hotels and car rental companies and tavernas and restaurants and all those rural economies built on tourism.
It’s hard to get our heads around the reality that, because we have wasted so much time in recognising the consequences of human-induced climate change, much of what we have come to take for granted is becoming impossible. Hard, too, to look out on the horizontal Irish rain in July and thank the invisible stars for our good fortune.
That infuriating Irish phrase, beloved of Irish mammies desperate to get the kids out of the house, was “sure a drop of rain never killed anybody”. It will increasingly sound not like a threat but like a blessing.