Notes from an Apocalypse
by Mark O'Connell [review]
The apocalypse needs to end. Anyone who writes about apocalypse today is bound to acknowledge that humans have worried and theorised about it for as long as they have worried and theorised about .. the fact that apocalypse is an essential principle of major and minor religions. Yet for a foundational concept it’s quite hard to pin down.
Just as “reality” is elusive in a once-fragmented world that has (very creatively) reassembled itself online, the apocalypse can apply to whatever you want it to: the Greek root means to uncover or reveal, hence the Book of Revelation, hence the hard truths we learn about humanity’s consequential inaction in every apocalypse story. Marxist revolution can be an apocalypse; relationship experts speak about the “Four Horsemen” of divorce. Apocalypse is a shifting abstraction, a deceptively neat encapsulation of cascading associations and ideas.
Just as “reality” is elusive in a once-fragmented world that has (very creatively) reassembled itself online, the apocalypse can apply to whatever you want it to: the Greek root means to uncover or reveal, hence the Book of Revelation, hence the hard truths we learn about humanity’s consequential inaction in every apocalypse story. Marxist revolution can be an apocalypse; relationship experts speak about the “Four Horsemen” of divorce. Apocalypse is a shifting abstraction, a deceptively neat encapsulation of cascading associations and ideas.
In a blurb, the novelist Jenny Offill describes O’Connell as “a genius guide through all the circles of imagined or anticipated doom”,
... reading his descriptions of... Chernobyl... the group... finds a room in which “a dozen or so toddler-size chairs were arranged in a circle, and on each was perched a rotting doll or distempered teddy bear”.
... reading his descriptions of... Chernobyl... the group... finds a room in which “a dozen or so toddler-size chairs were arranged in a circle, and on each was perched a rotting doll or distempered teddy bear”.
As the literary critic Frank Kermode had it, the apocalypse is a fiction, one that lends humanity a “sense of an ending”. In his book of that name, Kermode argued that “crisis is a way of thinking about one’s moment, and not inherent in the moment itself”. Man arrives in the world in media res, and the apocalypse is a “coherent pattern” he follows to create “consonance” from the discord inherent in the individual’s relationship to the world. (This is also why, when doomsday preppers get the date of the Rapture wrong, they always claim it was due to an interpretative or mathematical error – never because the myth is bunk.)
