Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,4

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?

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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,