Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,58
were an insurance policy against the worst that might happen.
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I’d had a weird experience at Heathrow Airport about a month before that trip to Alladale. My first book had been published earlier that year, and I’d been flying a lot in the period since, to book festivals and other events, and running beneath the white noise of my days was a low hum of guilt and shame about the damage my own individual life was doing to the world, the future. In accordance with my anxious custom I had arrived at the airport much too early, established myself at the conveyor belt of a Yo! Sushi. I drank a Japanese wheat ale, and then another. I racked up a tottering stack of color-coded dishes, consuming marine species in delicate arrangements, mackerel, salmon, crab, octopus, tuna. Everything was in season; everything presented itself for immediate acquisition from the moving platform that snaked around the bar, renewing its lavish stock as if by some fairy-tale mechanism of self-replenishing bounty. I was aware of the rapidity with which people were coming and going, racking up their own little stacks of dishes, before grabbing their briefcases, their flight bags, their backpacks, and hurrying for the gates. I had been sitting there for perhaps an hour, longer than the intended Yo! Sushi dining experience, when I became aware that my heart was racing, that I was experiencing a kind of abstract terror. I looked out over the heaving open-plan restaurant, with its ill-defined borders against other similarly heaving restaurants, a gastropub “experience,” a Heston Blumenthal–branded solution for on-the-go molecular gastronomy, a high-end meat-and-two-veg concern. In that delirium of commerce, the whole thing lay revealed to me in all its efficiency and excess, its bleak luminescence. I looked at the bright little plates of fish and rice and seaweed and meat as they sailed across my field of vision, cruising their way smoothly around the room to be plucked deftly now and then off the conveyor belt by mostly lone travelers, doughy and exhausted men in pinstripes, young couples in loose-fitting leisure attire, and I thought about the volume of animal and human flesh that was required to keep this system going, the raw tonnage of fuel needed to extract the fish from the sea and ship them to where they were processed, to get them to the gaping mouths of my fellow consumers. All these humans moving between all these places, all this ceaseless motion and consumption, all this hunger and money and flux: it was miraculous and terrible. And it simply couldn’t last, was the obvious thing, it simply could not be maintained. The sheer weight and velocity of the system, all of it precariously undergirded by God knew what shifting substructures of finance and power.
An airport is a place in which time and personal autonomy are suspended, in which the only freedom you possess is the freedom to make purchases. The aggressive automation of labor; the nightmare synthesis of fevered consumerism and authoritarian surveillance; the apocalyptic frisson of knowing that all this exists in service of, and is dependent upon, massive rates of carbon consumption. And always, too, the distant limbic hum of death, the screaming descent of the burning jet, as the situation’s presiding possibilities, the Chekhovian pistols unholstered at security and irrevocably introduced into the psychic theater of air travel. The oppressive space of the airport—the junkspace, to use Rem Koolhaas’s unimprovable term—is the architecture of the future itself.
I kept returning to the Heathrow sushi revelation, internally and in conversations with others, because I encountered it as a sort of wound. I encountered it, I mean, as both a realization of the wrongness of our way of life and a mournful intimation of its future passing.
I mentioned it to Andres one afternoon as we sat cross-legged in the grass, and he said it made him think of a graph he had once seen that illustrated the rate of increase of resource consumption throughout the twentieth century and into our time. In the years after the Second World War, he said, the line of consumption had begun to shoot skyward at a vertiginous rate, and looking at it, he experienced a kind of fearful swooning, as though he were gazing downward into an abyss. Looking at the near-vertical line on a page, he said, he felt that he had come into a direct encounter with the absurdity of our world, our way of life.