The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his notebook (titled Meditations by Victorian translators, but he never called it that):

Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear … Things themselves touch not the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they admission to the soul, nor can they turn or move the soul: but the soul turns and moves itself alone, and whatever judgments it may think proper to make, such it makes for itself the things which present themselves to it. (Book 5, 18–19)

I had a better opportunity than I ever wanted, for a week in mid-September, to test my ability to rise above the petty needs of the body. Spoiler: I’m terrible at it.

I live in Seattle, on that West Coast that has been in flames for weeks. On September 10, the prevailing winds pushed the smoke up from California and Oregon and then discovered urgent business elsewhere, leaving western Washington trapped under that smoke for eight days. For most of those days Seattle had the worst air quality in the world, a distinction usually reserved for industrial cities in China. (Chinese people don’t deserve that fate either.)

It’s a strange experience being already in a lockdown because of a pandemic, and then being locked down even harder by a visitation of toxic smoke. (It’s not just the ordinary smoke of burning trees, it’s also toxic smoke of burning houses and cars and factories.) When the first lockdown started it was phrased as “stay home,” and I panicked (like many), fearing that meant “don’t go out at all.” Not even for walks? Clarification came swiftly: no, you can go out for exercise, just make sure to distance. Whew; thank you baby Jesus. We learned to veer away from each other, some better than others, and it became manageable. (For people who can work from home and don’t have small children, that is—for most people it’s not manageable, it’s a nightmare.)

At that point I thought I had done the required adjusting. It’s pretty Trumpish to think that in a country that is dealing with the virus worse than any other, but at least I wasn’t organizing anti-mask protests. I was wearing a mask, and distancing, and keeping trips to the grocery store short.

But guess what: a virus is one thing, and weather is another, and brownie points for dealing with one are worthless currency for the other, and there is no law that keeps them from overlapping. Smoke doesn’t care if you’ve been following the rules, smoke just shows up.

So the air-quality warning went into effect and stayed in effect for those eight long days. It was forecast to last only one day, yielding to an airflow from the Pacific on Saturday September 12, but the airflow fell back defeated in the face of all that soot. There were more “maybe if the wind is strong enough” predictions after that but they all disappointed, until finally one didn’t.

I didn’t take it well or philosophically or stoically at all.

I don’t really care though; I’m only human. Who would like to be confined inside in hot stale air, with wildfire smoke pressing up against the windows? Sleeping in a tub like Diogenes is all very well, but what I was missing (along with millions of others on the west coast) were the most humble of basic pleasures—open windows, fresh air, walks, the last days of summer. Not breathing smoke and looking out the window at smoke and Googling every hour to find out how bad the air was.

The fact is he’s a bit of a downer, Marcus A. Remember you’re a speck of dust, he tells himself and, because his book was anointed a classic, he tells us too. No, I don’t think I will, thanks, at least not constantly. I don’t really hold with detachment as a way of being in the world. My strategy for dealing with the pandemic disruptions and deprivations is not to detach but to zoom in even closer on the goods I can still enjoy. I treat walks in my neighborhood as if they were visits to the Rijksmuseum or the Louvre, every flower and shrub a piece of art.

It’s a stopgap though—fiddling while Rome burns, as Marcus’s fellow-emperor Nero is reputed to have done. Much of what made the smoke week so horrible is the fact that it wasn’t a fluke, much less a purely local incident—on the contrary, it’s simply the future. South of here the fires are still raging, and it looks as if they’ll be an annual event. As scientists and reporters keep saying, this is climate change, not in the future or somewhere far away, but here, now.

As of September 18, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that 6.7 million acres have burned so far this year. Our attitude to this, our ways of coping with the results, our struggles to stay cheerful, are so much foam on the surface of a flood.

The climate journalist Abrahm Lustgarten wrote in a recent article for ProPublica and The New York Times:

This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms—all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the twelfth named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record.

You can be Stoic or Buddhist or just plain callous all day long, but you’d still better keep a go-bag at the door.