Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,47

talk, this language of floods and redemption, a personal God driven by love and vengeance. I didn’t get the feeling he was trying to convert me, for what it was worth. My sense of it was we were just two guys talking.

Somewhere around Glendale, we stopped at some lights. I looked out the window and saw in front of a gas station an old man with long hair and a beard, yellowed and fulsome. He had headphones on, and he was jogging rhythmically on the spot. His eyes were closed and he was grinning with startling abandon, and in his hands he held a white wooden cross, not quite to scale, which he jounced up and down as he jogged. He was a sight to see, though nobody was paying him the least attention.

I remembered the kid I had seen by the river in South Dakota, wilding out with his headphones on. He, too, was in some trance of rapturous communion, impenetrable to the casual witness, comprehensible only as madness. I imagined that these two men were somehow connected, that they were members of a secret shamanic order, some vast collective of lone ecstatic dancers, channeling the death-seeking energies of the culture, the historical poison in the soil.

I remembered, then, something I had read not long before about a cultic ritual known as the Ghost Dance that had become widespread among certain Native American tribes toward the end of the nineteenth century. This was a circular dance, undertaken for many hours at a stretch, whose practitioners believed that in so doing they were hastening the end of the world, that the dance itself would cause the ground to open up and consume the colonizers and all their works, and that during this time the Native people would be ascended to heaven, to be replaced safely on their land at the end of the time of destruction.

The dance, needless to say, did not bring about the desired result. From a Native point of view, the apocalypse was in any case a matter of historical record.

6

UNDER THE HIDE

When he was four, my son got very heavily into Dr. Seuss. By this I don’t just mean that he enjoyed his mother and me reading the books to him—although there was certainly that: a great many bedtime giggling fits were sustained by way of exposure to the morally questionable high jinks of The Cat in the Hat, the alliterative absurdities of Fox in Socks—but that he was so affected by the books that he began to think about their author in a way that seemed to me to mark a deepening of his engagement with the world. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that his discovery of Dr. Seuss was also his introduction to the concept of the artist: a recognition of the fact that a book or a song comes to exist in a different sort of way to a Lego Minifigure or a chocolate bar; that it is the creation of a particular person with an irreducible experience and manner of expressing it.

It was agreed that Dr. Seuss was a genius. It was further agreed that Seuss’s magnum opus was The Lorax. Certainly, it was the book that provoked the most questions and conversations, whose language and ideas were most thoroughly absorbed into our everyday exchanges. If it’s not an outright work of postapocalyptic nonfiction, then The Lorax is about as close to being one as an illustrated book for preschoolers has any business being. Its setting is a bare and blasted landscape, where nothing grows save for a spindly black weed called “Grickle-grass,” and it’s in this dead place—where all birdsong has fallen silent save for the occasional croaking crow, and where the “wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows”—that we encounter a mysterious and sinister character named the Once-ler, who dwells in an impossibly rickety tower with boarded-up windows. The Once-ler’s face is never revealed to us in the illustrations. Seuss represents his villain-protagonist as a pair of long green arms and, now and then, two yellow eyes staring eerily from the crepuscular recesses of his tower. We meet this uncannily partial personage via a character clearly intended as a stand-in for the child to whom the story is being told: a little boy who is in fact explicitly referred to as “You” and who, as the book begins, has tracked down the Once-ler to his hideout “at the far edge of town” in order to find out what happened