Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,3

buy what I want to buy, eat what I want to eat, go where I want to go. I want to be able to leave my tiny island in the North Atlantic when I need to, or just when I feel like it. And if polar bears are going to be starving to death due to habitat destruction, I want to be able to watch deeply upsetting YouTube videos about it.

You will note that this book about the apocalyptic tenor of our time features a great many interludes of travel to distant places—to Ukraine and California and South Dakota, to the highlands of Scotland and to New Zealand—and that I neither walked nor sailed nor took a train to any of these places. And let the record further show that during the time I was traveling for this book, I was also traveling to many other places to talk about my previous book. My footprint is as broad and deep and indelible as my guilt.

My days are a procession of last things, seals opened. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak. That is the prophesy of this book.

* * *

—

The origins of my own obsession with this topic are buried deep in the submerged civilization of childhood. One of my earliest memories pertains to the end of the world. I was in the kitchen of my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was at the stove, and I was sitting at the table with my uncle, who was explaining to me the likely outcome of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia. I don’t know why he was doing this, other than that it was the mid-eighties and the chill of the Cold War could still be felt in the air, and he was in any case very much that kind of uncle. I’m guessing I was five, maybe six.

From a fruit bowl in the center of the table he selected first three apples, and then two small clementines. The apples he spread out on the table at equal intervals; then he carefully positioned the clementines on top of the rightward and leftward apples, leaving the middle one untouched. The apple on the left, he said, was the United States, while the one on the right was Russia. And the apple in the middle, he said, was Ireland, where we were. Its location, he explained, was more or less exactly halfway between the United States and the Soviet Union, gigantic countries of which there were two important things to be said: that they despised each other for reasons too complicated to get into with a child, and that they were both armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles, bombs so powerful that they were capable of wiping out entire countries in a matter of moments. I should imagine, he said, that the clementines were nuclear bombs.

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: