trends in the ends of the world

io9 reports the findings from a student’s thesis that tracks patterns in 423 apocalyptic stories (in whatever format) from 1826 to 2007 about what will bring about the end of the world — or at least the end of the world as we know it.  while there are a number of predictable patterns (e.g., concerns about nuclear holocaust after 1945, visions of a robot rebellion — read, meeting our end through our own creations — following WWI, etc.), there is a surprising change in mid-1990s: a surge of stories in which there is no explanation of the end.  these take the form, of course, of post-apocalypses that start at the end, so to speak.  there is never any explanation of how the characters arrived there or what on earth happened (literally).  think, for instance, of The Road.

in light of this find, the author offers up some interesting thoughts:

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn’t matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn’t mean the story’s finished; much of the time, it’s only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they’re about the beginning that comes after.

Preceding victory with annihilation disguises how dizzily optimistic some of these narratives are. Stories about the End are so beautifully paradoxical; they are some of the most powerful affirmation stories we have. They can hardly be classified as optimistic, but no matter what happens, even if the End came by human hands, in most stories we are fixable. For the most part, we have faith that though we may screw up, and very badly, we will learn from our mistakes and the world will be better for it.

…

Destroying the world in books about apocalypse is one way we can entirely take ownership of it. We can only see the world the way we have been raised to, the way our parents saw it, so we need to raze the old world and build a new one in its place in order to have a world that is really and entirely our own. The story of the End, after all, is not nearly as compelling as the story of the Beginning that comes after it.

speaking (as I did) of The Road, despite its overwhelming gloom, there is an obvious hope, however bleak, in the form of the son.  in a particularly wonderful passage, McCarthy writes,

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared.  Along the interestate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars.  The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in the blackened rings of wire.  The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats.  Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.  They went on.  Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel.  The nights dead still and deader black.  So cold.  They talked hardly at all.  He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood.  Slumping along.  Filthy, ragged, hopeless.  He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some  unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a tabernacle.

the trick of all this literature, then — and apparently its appeal for some time now — is to imagine just what that “unimaginable future” might be.

book review: The Road

almost every other sentence knocks the wind out of you.  McCarthy is an incredible writer whose insights are devastating yet beautiful.  in other books those insights may sneak up on you now and then, but in this book they don’t stop, which is fitting for a post-apocalyptic world and for a father and son who’ve known too much horror and too little hope.  this is their world and their hope:

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared.  Along the interestate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars.  The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in the blackened rings of wire.  The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats.  Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.  They went on.  Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel.  The nights dead still and deader black.  So cold.  They talked hardly at all.  He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood.  Slumping along.  Filthy, ragged, hopeless.  He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some  unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a tabernacle.

the book is also fairly terrifying at moments, though McCarthy manages to do that just be setting up this horrible world and without having to build things up or place you in continuous suspense.  you are always on the brink of a certain terror, and it comes and goes easily, keeping you on edge in all the uncertainty of their lives.

I’m not sure that I could carry the fire.

a favorite one-liner: “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

the absolute truth

another unsurprisingly bleak quote from Cormac McCarthy, this time from The Road.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world.  The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.  Darkness implacable.  The blind dogs of the sun in their running.  The crushing black vacuum of the universe.  And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.  Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

he amazes me.

book review: All the Pretty Horses

from the very start I sensed the bleakness but overall beauty of McCarthy’s writing and knew I would enjoy the book. I did think, however, that much would depend on the plot directions of the book, and I was not disappointed. the book is beautiful, desolate, and heartbreaking to be sure, but in a more subtle way, which vibes more with what seems to be at the heart of his writing: the idea that the world, for all its beauty and violence, is indifferent. two more quotes from the book may help to illustrate this:

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the worlds pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

…

…and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.

whatever it means about me, I adore books (and their writers) that look directly into the face of suffering and beauty and that seek to understand or at least to deal directly with the truths about this world and about us and the contradictions, frustrations, and the ceaselessness of it all. and it doesn’t hurt when those writers are quite talented.

for the record: never saw the movie and sure as hell don’t want to have the book ruined for me now.

no control group

a quote on history from a character in All the Pretty Horses:

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that God — who knows all that can be known — seems powerless to change.

sunken eyes

a strong if bleak quote from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

His father rode sitting forward slightly in the saddle, holding the reins in one hand about two inches above the saddlehorn. So thin and frail, lost in his clothes. Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen elsewhere of it. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would be forever.