Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,5
she said; most of the time it was enough just to glance at the headline. Though I took her basic point about duration of exposure, it was the headlines themselves that were the proximal cause of my distress.
This was a time in which payloads of apocalyptic force were delivered to the lock screen of my phone. It was the end of 2016, the winter of an ignoble year, and the more or less hourly vibration in my pocket was a kind of post-traumatic thrum, a bracing for whatever fresh hell I was about to peer into. I had come to think of my phone as my eschatology handset, my streaming service of last things. The world would end neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a push notification—a buzzing I wasn’t even sure I’d felt, but figured I’d better check anyway, to see if it was real, and what it might portend.
My wife—a person of unfathomable resilience and practical wisdom, to whom such fugue states of panic and epochal despair were essentially foreign—advised me to leave my apocalyptic obsessions at the door. The vibes were bad enough out there in the world, on the airwaves and the timelines, without my channeling them into the home. I was not John of Patmos, and this was not some cave of island exile: this was a house, and people were trying to live in it.
My therapist, another wise and practically minded person, made a remark that stayed with me. She did not intend for me to take the remark as a suggestion, she said, but it bore pointing out that a lot of people, when they experienced the kinds of anxieties I was experiencing, threw themselves into their work.
She didn’t intend it as a suggestion, but it could be argued that I took it as such. It could be argued that this very book is the product of the work into which I subsequently threw myself. It is both a privilege and a curse of being a writer that throwing yourself into your work so often involves immersing yourself deeper into the exact anxieties and obsessions other people throw themselves into their work to avoid. I don’t mean to suggest that this book began as some kind of therapeutic enterprise, but neither did it arise out of some sharp and rational focus of inquiry. The truth is that it arose out of a much stranger and more perverse motivation. I was anxious about the apocalyptic tenor of our time, it is true, but I was also intrigued. These were dark days, no question, but they were also interesting ones: wildly and inexorably interesting. I was drawn toward the thing that frightened me, the thing that threatened to tear everything apart, myself included.
Often, when I thought about this perverse motivation of mine, I thought about the narrator of James Joyce’s story “The Sisters,” who remembers as a boy being both repelled and fascinated by an elderly priest, paralyzed and dying in the wake of a stroke. Every night, he would repeat quietly to himself the word paralysis. “It filled me with fear,” he says, “and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”
I wanted to be near to the idea of the apocalypse, to look upon what evidence of its deadly work could be found in the present: not in the form of numbers or projections, which are nowadays mostly how it’s revealed to us, but rather in the form of places—landscapes both real and imaginary where the end of the world could be glimpsed. And so this book is in some sense the outcome of a series of perverse pilgrimages, to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present.
Pilgrimage. Why do I insist on such a weirdly religious, even self-aggrandizing usage? Because I was looking for something in these places, for some kind of enlightenment or edification or even solace. Needless to say I found these only fleetingly, but perhaps the wisdom is to be found in the looking, or so it suits me to believe. And all of the places that I encountered in the year or thereabouts I spent traveling for this book seemed to me to be charged with special significance, with the potential to reveal something crucial about the strange and nervous time, the hysterical days, in which I found myself to be living.