This thing I had experienced the previous evening was different—less intense and urgent, for one thing, less literally feverish—but it had seemed to arise from a similar place, and to suggest a rupture of the boundary between myself and the world. Was this, I wondered, what Freud was referring to when he talked, in Civilization and Its Discontents, about what he called the “oceanic feeling”—the sense of the eternal, the limitless, the boundless? Freud could find no evidence of any such feeling in himself, nor the capacity to experience it, but this didn’t stop him from expanding on it at considerable length, based on the descriptions of his friend the French writer Romain Rolland. Rolland had told him that he himself was constantly experiencing this feeling, which was, Freud wrote, “a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it, but it was the source of the religious energy that was seized upon by the various churches and religious systems, directed into particular channels and certainly consumed by them. On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion.” Freud himself did not agree with Rolland that this oceanic feeling was in fact the source of all religious sentiment. I don’t suppose I would describe my experience as religious, either, or even spiritual. There didn’t seem to be anything magical about it, so much as it was a kind of insight into the aliveness of the world.
I had practiced meditation on and off over the last few years, and, while there had been frankly diminishing returns with respect to general mindfulness and well-being, it did occasionally have the effect of creating a mood of immersion in the sensory experience of sound, relieving me for a time of my relentless interiority, and cultivating something like Freud’s feeling of the oceanic. And so, sitting in front of my tent, I had closed my eyes and slowed my breathing and was striving to focus on the sensation of air filling and evacuating my lungs, and was attuning myself to the heterogeneous sounds of the wilderness—the distant elated whoop of a lapwing, the tinny whine of a passing mosquito, the endless whispered self-assertions of the river—when out of nowhere the world was murdered, obliterated by a great rupture in the sky. It was the loudest sound I had ever encountered, though I felt it more than heard it: an actual physical force, a violence from the heavens. I opened my eyes, and coming low over the river—three hundred feet, two hundred, a hundred—was a jet shrieking toward me at atrocious speed, and in my mind was the possibility of only one outcome, which was immediate and absolute annihilation. I saw the solitary figure of the pilot in the cockpit, the blank visor of the helmet, and I knew that I’d been seen, and I heard myself howl more in exhilaration than in terror, and then the monstrous visitation was gone, swooping skyward from the water, up and out of the valley and away, leaving only the throbbing echo of the wound it had inflicted on the air. I had dreamt this scene many times, I realized, or something like it, the screaming descent of a plane into a city or a canyon or a body of water, but in those dreams the jet was always a commercial liner, and I was always inside it, frozen in terror, alone, watching the ground rise up to meet me, the vast actuality of onrushing death. I was on my feet now, looking at the sky, and I felt as though I had been on the outside of my own recurring dream, and I was laughing uncontrollably, and my hands were trembling, and I felt utterly alive, and almost physically overcome by an elation of gratitude, though I had no earthly sense of whom or what I might be grateful to.
The irony took some time to settle in, but when it did it settled in deep, and I could think of nothing else. Here I was, the farthest into the wilderness I had ever been, in pursuit of some half-conceived notion of the sublime, of an encounter with the stillness of nature, only to be confronted with the apocalyptic force of the machinery of war. It felt like a mysterious and at the same time almost laughably overdetermined epiphany, a sudden obliteration of one kind of truth by another. (Attempting to follow in the footsteps of Emerson, I had come face-to-face with Pynchon.) I had encountered the sublime after all, but in a form entirely other than what I’d hoped for: this was the military-industrial sublime, the divine violence of technology.
This machine that had flown over my head, close enough that it had tousled my hair like a fond uncle, was, I later learned, a Typhoon bomber from the nearby base of Lossiemouth on the North Sea coast, from where, at that time, the RAF flew jets out to Cyprus for bombing missions in Syria. It was strange, surreally instructive, to have my little retreat disrupted in this way. I had formed a sacred circle of stones around myself, to make a place of stillness and contemplation and communion with nature, and what had been revealed to me was politics in its rawest form. This wilderness reserve, this place ostensibly dedicated to the undoing of human damage, was also a training arena for war. There is no place where you are outside of power.
In that moment the idea of the apocalypse came into sudden and violent focus. It was already the end of the world for the people that fighter jet was likely headed toward. They were experiencing all the things by which I, in my remote and abstract fashion, was preoccupied: the fragility of political orders, the collapse of civilization. Five million of them, fleeing the terror and chaos of their ruined country, meeting the cruel machinery of Europe and its borders. It was always the end of the world for someone, somewhere.
7
THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF THE FUTURE
Because I wanted to know what the end of the world might look like, I wanted to go to the Zone. I wanted to haunt its ruins, and be haunted by them. I wanted to see what could not otherwise be seen, to inspect the remains of the human era. The Zone presented this prospect in a manner more clear and stark than any other place I was aware of. It seemed to me that to travel there would be to see the end of the world from the vantage point of its aftermath.
I wanted to go, but not alone. A couple of months after the retreat in Alladale, I called my friend Dylan, who lived in London, and who of all my friends was the one I felt would most likely agree to accompany me to Ukraine on short notice. He was his own boss, for one thing, and he was not short of money, and he was also in the midst of a divorce, amicable but nonetheless complex in its practicalities. It would, I said, be a kind of anti–stag party: his marriage was ending, and I was dragging him to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for a weekend. As soon as I’d made it, I felt some discomfort about this joke, with its laddish overtones, as though I were proposing the trip for the sheer lols, or as an exploit in extreme tourism, or, worse still, some kind of stunt journalism enterprise combining elements of both. I was keen to avoid seeing myself in this way.
“I haven’t told anyone I’m going,” said Dylan over the phone. I was at my hotel at Heathrow.
“Why the secretiveness?” I asked.
“I don’t need the hassle,” he said. “People thinking I’m weird for wanting to go.”
“I know what you mean. There’s an ethical queasiness to the whole thing. I have issues with that myself.”