It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

I don’t say this to mock you for your beliefs if you happen to believe that death is a gateway to some new kind of life, to a heaven or reincarnation – you could well be right to believe such things.* My point, rather, is how we represent this end – both individual death, and the death of the world – in art and culture. And so far as that is concerned, the tenacity of our imagination becomes the defining feature of the end of the world. That is why so many imagined versions of the end of the world portray a cosmos that stubbornly persists as it ends, and even after it has ended. It is almost always the case that apocalypse leads us into a transcendent realm, in which the miseries of life have passed away.

And so we turn our end into a beginning.

* * *

When we’re talking about the end of the world, are we talking about the front end or the back end? Lots of things have both, from trains and snakes to conga lines. But thinking about ‘the end of the world’ in this context imparts a strange spin to the notion. I’m going to assume that your first thought was that it is the world’s back end. It is, after all, the last bit that we will encounter before it’s all over, the curtain call, the fag end, the last page of the book. But what if the end of the world is actually the front end? After all, it’s something that happens in time, and it’s hardly an original observation to note that we do not travel forward in time. You might think we do, but consider this: if we were travelling forward in time, we’d be able to see where we’re going. The fact that we can only see where we’ve already been means we must be moving backwards through time, hurtling in reverse one second per second with our backs to our destination.

If the idea of apocalypse as the front end of the world seems counter-intuitive, maybe you’ve been thinking in the wrong direction.* You’ve been assuming that we start in some place ‘in time’ – like John Bunyan’s City of Destruction, the beginning of Dorothy’s yellow brick road or the first square of the board game The Game of Life – and then walk forward from there, along our path, through various adventures, until we reach our destination: our Emerald City. But what if, instead of moving forwards, we are moving backwards? We can reach our arms back a little way and grope into our immediate future, but we can’t turn our heads far enough around to see where we are going. Despite this, we have no option but to keep going, our backs to our destination. We can see our past – indeed, most of us are hypnotised by the view and stare at it, whether longingly (it looks so much nicer than where we presently are) or in horror (such trauma!). For many of us, what we can see absorbs our attention, but where we are going is not visible. That fact ought to occupy our minds a little more than it does – we are moving backwards into our lives, with no real sense of what is behind us. Maybe it’s a clear, uncluttered road, or maybe we are about to crash into a brick wall.

Asking why we are engaged in this crazy behaviour is tantamount to asking why we exist. We run because the alternative is to be motionless, which is not being alive at all. So whether we run with the vigour of youth or the exhaustion of age, we run, and this is just how things are. We are all running together, and in a direction we can’t see. From time to time, individuals stumble and fall and their race is over, but the rest of us continue our bizarre backwards marathon.

What is behind us? Where will the race come to an end? And how far behind us is it? Maybe the pothole of a heart attack will trip us up, or perhaps a stretch of quicksand named ‘cancer’ will bog us down. Maybe we’ll keep running until our legs give out and we fall, or maybe we will tumble over a cliff edge into an abyss. Maybe the absolute end to the race for everyone is right behind us. We can never know. All we can know is that it’s there and try to make our peace with it.

* * *

We all deal with our knowledge of mortality in different ways. We might simply ignore it, although that’s not a very healthy way of living. The brute fact of it might make us fearful, or we might find a kind of existential tranquillity in its inevitability.

My personal preference for handling it – humour – is not universally popular, and you may decide that my larger arguments about the end of the world here are undermined by my predilection for joking. To each their own.

I can hardly defend my own ‘jokes’, several examples of which you have already encountered if you’ve read this far, but I would note that humour looms large in the story of the apocalypse. This is why so much apocalyptic fantasy is so kitsch and over-the-top, so melodramatic and heightened. A book like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (1990) styles the apocalypse of St John as comedy, combining satire and a broader comic sensibility into something that is both profound and hilarious. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s This Is the End (2013) treats the same topic with vulgar slapstick and cynicism. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) treats the end of the world by nuclear war as black comedy. ‘You’ve got to laugh,’ as the adage has it, ‘or you’d cry.’

My approach in this book is comic, but that does not mean