It does give me hope to read this, but it is in the end a compromised sort of hope, heavy with guilt and recrimination. It’s the same sort of hope I feel when I lie on my son’s bed, reading the final lines of The Lorax. Arendt’s beautiful notion of beginnings in the midst of endings is not unlike the handing down of the last of the Truffula seeds. It allows us some hope, but it puts a lot of pressure on the objects of that hope. Another way to put this might be to say that the reason to be afraid for the future—the children who will have to live in the world we have made, and are still making—is the best reason to have hope for it.
Lately, though, I find that I am no longer submitting to my own ethical interrogations on the topic of reproduction. I find that I am no longer retrospectively agonizing over whether it was morally wrong to have had children in the first place. The question itself, or the act of asking it, has come to seem essentially absurd. We put on a song she likes, and my daughter’s eyes brighten, and she raises her soft little hands in the air and starts to bounce up and down in approximate rhythm with the beat, and suddenly all such philosophical considerations are exposed as frivolous, almost embarrassingly beside the point. Because the point, for the time being, is obvious. The point, more or less, is dancing.
It strikes me now, having extracted it from life and set it down here in the context of this book, that this image—my baby daughter doing her little syncopated bounce, tiny hands aloft—echoes discordantly with the images of those two other dancers: the old man jumping up and down with the crucifix outside the gas station in Los Angeles, the kid head-banging and shredding air guitar on the street in South Dakota. It seems to me that I was employing a form of pathetic fallacy with these guys, projecting my own psychological states onto fleeting visions of complete strangers, people of whose lives or situations or motivations I knew exactly nothing. I was aestheticizing what may have been suffering or madness or ecstasy, and thereby reducing it to a neat emblem of my own anxiety. I was the one channeling the death-seeking energies of the culture, dancing the ghost dance of the mind. They were simply dancing. They were dancing, more than likely, for the same reason my daughter dances. Because they felt like it, because they happened to be alive, and really what else is a person who finds themselves in that situation supposed to do?
* * *
—
I will say that at the time I began writing this book, I was preoccupied by visions of catastrophe, instinctive fantasies of retreat. All those hours watching prepper videos on YouTube, thinking about bunkers and food storage and water filtration and so on: my approach to this was intellectual and in all senses of the word critical, but on some level I always understood my irony to be also a pose, also a kind of defensive crouch. One man reads the signs and portents, picks up the unmistakable scent of blood in the air, and he builds a bunker, stocks up on flavored protein sludge, makes a YouTube video about surviving civilizational collapse. Another receives these same signals and meditates on the meaning of the bunker, the protein sludge, the man in the video, etc., etc., etc. Both are looking for ways to negotiate their terror.
I wonder now whether it is because of or despite the strange series of pilgrimages I have been on that I have come at last to this place of accommodation, tentative though it may be. How could it be that after more than a year in search of vistas of devastation, intimations of the end, I no longer feel such despair about the future? I am tempted to say that I cured myself of my apocalyptic anxiety by means of a kind of exposure therapy. Though I suspect there might be some measure of truth to this, it feels diluted to a homeopathic degree. No, the real truth, as always, is simpler, and as always it is more mysterious.
Somewhere along the way, in any case, it became apparent to me that a state of perpetual anxiety was no way to live. It became apparent that my obsessing over the end of the world constituted a kind of retreat, and that that retreat was a kind of dying. “The taste for worse case scenarios,” wrote Susan Sontag, “reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.” I knew the first claim to be accurate, and suspected the second was not far from the truth either.
The future is a source of fear not because we know what will happen, and that it will be terrible, but because we know so little, and have so little control. The apocalyptic sensibility, the apocalyptic style, is seductive because it offers a way out of this situation: it vaults us over the epistemological chasm of the future, clear into a final destination, the end of all things. Out of the murk of time emerges the clear shape of a vision, a revelation, and you can see at last where the whole mess is headed. All of it—history, politics, struggle, life—is near to an end, and the relief is palpable.
I have known my own moments of cosmic nihilism. I know how it feels to consider the prospect of total destruction, the annihilation of all human meaning, and to take comfort in saying so be it, let it happen. I have felt that strange peace, watching a pair of kestrels spiraling upward through the shell of a cooling tower, black against the inhuman blue of a Chernobyl sky. I have felt it in the Scottish Highlands, attuning my ears to the sound of a world without human voices, and even in a windowless room in Pasadena, listening to knowledgeable men talk about our destiny as a multi-planetary species, thinking to hell with the future and everything else. I have felt it at this very desk, watching streaming footage of a floating trash continent in the Pacific, the Great Barrier Reef in a state of noxious decay.
Science, for what it’s worth, is unambiguous on this point: all systems inexorably tend toward total entropy. Ice caps, political orders, ecologies, civilizations, human bodies, the universe itself. In the long run, everything is nothing.
But in the meantime, everything is not nothing, not even close. In the meantime, we have no idea what might come to pass. Make of that what you will, is my point.
And so lately, I have lost my taste for cosmic nihilism, cosmic despair. Lately I have been glad to be alive in this time, if only because there is no other time in which it’s possible to be alive. And I would think it a real shame, in the end, if there were nobody around to experience the world, because although it is a lot of other things, I would agree with my son that it is also an undeniably interesting place. You kind of have to hand it to the world, in that sense.
I’ve been working recently in the reading room of the National Library on Kildare Street. The building is adjacent to Leinster House, where Ireland’s houses of parliament sit. The other day, I heard the sound of chanting drifting up from the street, high and insistent, but couldn’t quite make out what the chanters were saying, and so I closed my laptop and walked down the marble staircase and out into the street. I didn’t stop to grab my coat from my locker, and I didn’t regret it either, because although it was only February it was wasn’t strictly speaking jacket weather. The day was bright, and it was warmer than it had any business being this time of year. Intellectually, I understood this to be an omen of apocalypse, but I felt it as the unexpected blessing of an early spring, a day suddenly warm with life and possibility. Maybe it was the end of the world, or maybe it was just a nice day, or maybe it was both.