“The twentieth century. Oh dear, the world has got so terribly, terribly old.” This quotation arrives at the beginning of Richard Seymour’s new book, The Disenchanted Earth. A form of solastalgia — a sense of loss for the things not yet lost — pervades his work; “It’s all dying,” he declares on the back of the dust jacket: “Visit it, as you would a dying patient.”

Seymour borrows this first quotation from Tony Kushner’s epic play series Angels in America, a “Gay Fantasia” which subverts our more conventional ideas of tragedy by, among other things, undercutting the sublime and elevating the uncanny. Kushner’s play, completed in the early 1990s, visits many “dying patients” — men struggling with a terrible virus, a nation gripped by apocalyptic visions of collapse. Kushner takes the familiar metaphor of the “net of human life” — a favorite metaphor of the old tragedians — and repurposes it for the twentieth century.

In turn, his “net” becomes a metaphor for both the AIDS crisis and the holes in the ozone layer. His characters struggle to make sense of the tragedy, of the chaos that surrounds them. As one character puts it in the final scene: “You can’t live in the world without an idea of the world, but it’s living that makes the ideas. You can’t wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.”