Let’s say the Russians decided to launch a missile at the Americans, he said. The missile’s launch would be quickly picked up by the Americans’ detection systems, and they would immediately launch their own missile in retaliation. Here he plucked the clementines from the top of the superpower apples and sent them arcing through the air above the table. And because Ireland was located exactly between Russia and the United States, he said, the missiles would collide right over our heads.
I remember what he said then, as he smashed the two clementines together above the middle apple, and the grim satisfaction with which he said it: “Good night, Irene!”
I don’t remember how I felt about this performance. The fact that I’m telling you about it now, more than thirty years later, in the context of a book about the apocalypse, suggests that its effects registered in the psychic depths. Oddly enough, it never stopped me enjoying clementines, or “easy peelers,” as they’ve since come to be known.
* * *
—
Writing in the fifth century AD, Saint Augustine observed that three centuries before his own time, the earliest followers of Jesus, consumed with apocalyptic fervor, believed themselves to be living in the “last days” of creation.
“And if there were ‘last days’ then,” he wrote, “how much more so now!”
The point being, for our purposes here, that it has always been the end of the world. Our entire civilization—from Ragnarok to Revelation to The Road—rests on a foundation of flood and fire. But what if now it’s especially the end of the world, by which I mean even more the end of the world: really and truly and at long last the end (or something like it)? And this in turn raises the question of what is meant by the end of the world. Because, in truth, isn’t the idea an absurd one? How could the world just end? The world is not a business to be wound up, a property to be foreclosed on overnight.
Global nuclear war, it is true, could in theory wipe out all organic life on the planet, but that seems, at time of writing at least, a long shot.
As for climate change, only on the outermost edge of the spectrum of possibilities can be glimpsed the perfect black of annihilation. No, what is actually meant by the end of the world is, in its particulars, a province of terrors fleetingly glimpsed, barely apprehended. What we are talking about is the collapse of the systems by which the known world operates, slowly and then all at once.
It is customary now to speak of the looming effects of climate change, the looming catastrophe. We live in a time of looming, of things impending and imminent. The culture is presided over by an unsettling array of looming phenomena—looming climate catastrophe, certainly, but also looming right-wing populism, and the looming specter of the employment crisis that will be brought on by widespread automation across multiple economic sectors.
Here’s a thing you can do if you are interested in receiving portents and symbols, signatures of our time. You can go to Google’s Ngram feature—a graphing application that measures, over a set period, the occurrences of a particular word or phrase in the thirty million or so volumes that have so far been scanned by Google in its effort to digitize the world’s books—and you can do a search for the phrase looming crisis, and you will see a blue line measuring usages of the term between 1800 and 2008, and you will note that, after some barely perceptible bumps in the years around the First and Second World Wars, it begins to rise non-trivially in the early years of the Cold War, before climbing so precipitously throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, with such dizzying speed and persistence, that it becomes a Matterhorn of cultural anxieties. The graph itself takes on the appearance of a looming crisis, a line of rising terror.
And yet whatever it is we might mean by the end, are we not in this sense already at the beginning of it? Has the looming not in fact given way to the crisis itself?
* * *
—
The above, it strikes me, is as much personal reflection as cultural observation. This sense of looming crisis was one that I felt intensely throughout the time I am writing about here. I am talking, let me tell you, about a long run of very bad days: I couldn’t sneeze without thinking it was a portent of end times. I was obsessed with the future, an obsession that manifested as an inability to conceive of there being any kind of future at all. Personal, professional, and political anxieties had coalesced into a consuming apprehension of imminent catastrophe. I suppose it could be said that I was depressed—and in fact it was said, often enough, by me—but it was a state characterized not by a closure against the world, but by an excessive openness to it. There was a feedback loop in operation, whereby I perceived in the chaos of the world at large a reflection of my own subjective states, and the perception of the one seemed to heighten the experience of the other. Everything that mattered seemed poised on the brink of total collapse: my mind, my life, the world.
Another, blunter, way of putting all this would be to say that my journalistic objectivity, a fragile edifice to begin with, was under considerable strain.
I remember, during this time, awakening in the abject dawn from a nightmare: of imperious thudding on our front door, of pale hands plunging through the letter box, palpating the air we breathed, my little family and I, in our little house. These grasping fingers were not the most upsetting part of the dream. The most upsetting part of the dream was me, on my knees, growling and barking myself hoarse, in the hope of being taken for a large and aggressive dog.
It was suggested to me by my therapist that it might be helpful not to spend quite so much time following the news. I didn’t have to read everything, she said; most of the time it was enough just to glance at the headline. Though I took her basic point about duration of exposure, it was the headlines themselves that were the proximal cause of my distress.
This was a time in which payloads of apocalyptic force were delivered to the lock screen of my phone. It was the end of 2016, the winter of an ignoble year, and the more or less hourly vibration in my pocket was a kind of post-traumatic thrum, a bracing for whatever fresh hell I was about to peer into. I had come to think of my phone as my eschatology handset, my streaming service of last things. The world would end neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a push notification—a buzzing I wasn’t even sure I’d felt, but figured I’d better check anyway, to see if it was real, and what it might portend.
My wife—a person of unfathomable resilience and practical wisdom, to whom such fugue states of panic and epochal despair were essentially foreign—advised me to leave my apocalyptic obsessions at the door. The vibes were bad enough out there in the world, on the airwaves and the timelines, without my channeling them into the home. I was not John of Patmos, and this was not some cave of island exile: this was a house, and people were trying to live in it.
My therapist, another wise and practically minded person, made a remark that stayed with me. She did not intend for me to take the remark as a suggestion, she said, but it bore pointing out that a lot of people, when they experienced the kinds of anxieties I was experiencing, threw themselves into their work.