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Today was my last day teaching my apocalypse class. It's weird how discussing end times has been such a comfort: a touch of stability in an unstable world. Under the specter of war with Iran, stalked as ever by the climate crisis, and flanked by a global pandemic, we did so much.
Here's what I learned from our readings: our world is built on the back of many apocalypses: the land we inhabit, the food we eat, the species dying out around us. We carry the genetic memory of other human species we wiped out. We are—and are always in—the end of the world.
That end has never been equal. The pain that we feel as full lives—as full lived worlds—blink totally out of existence has never been equal. The present crisis is not being experienced equally, and the catastrophes to come will not be felt equally. There is so much to grieve.
Every moment of beauty any of us has ever experienced occurred in the wake, likely even on the site, of immense tragedy and immeasurable sorrow. These are not contradictory, and they do not negate or replace one another. That paradox is the condition for our being here as we are.
What I learned from and with my students is simple: We must take care of one another. We must fight for this world as though it's worth saving: because it is. We must lessen the suffering that surrounds us.
There are so many endings all over. And yet, and yet, and yet…we go on.
There are so many endings all over. And yet, and yet, and yet…we go on.
We engaged with a lot of different writers and thinkers, but here is a partial selection of our reading schedule, roughly in order (roughly half of which was selected by the students themselves):
At the heart of the entire course was Ling Ma's /Severance/. It was the first novel I've ever taught. It's a remarkably good and incisive book beyond the context of the global pandemic which now warps its reception. None of my students rated it lower than an 8 from -10 to +10.
@AlexKleeman, “You, Disappearing,” https://www.guernicamag.com/you-disappearing/, is the reason I taught this course at all. It remains the most insightful commentary I've read about what it means to build a life in ephemerality. The problem of the apocalypse is the problem of every day.
@helencphillips, “The Disaster Store,” https://www.guernicamag.com/the-disaster-store/; and “The Knowers,” https://electricliterature.com/the-knowers-helen-phillips/#article-main-4214 are both such playful, soulful, fun explorations of what it means to navigate our certain ends. I've taught “The Knowers” twice now, and it's so great.
@StephenKing, “Cookie Jar,” http://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2016/03/cookie-jar; and “Night Surf” both center the human in the midst of loss, in the wake of loss. King is so attuned to tragedies both everyday and cosmic, to how personal and societal apocalypses intersect.
Ray Bradbury, “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”; “Last Night of the World,” https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a14340/ray-bradbury-last-night-of-the-world-0251/; and “Embroidery” together made Bradbuy a mainstay of our course. “Last Night of the World,” in particular, weighs what makes the end scary and whether it has to be.
Philip K. Dick, “The Hanging Stranger,” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41562/41562-h/41562-h.htm; and “To Serve The Master” were both so pleasantly wry and spooky, serving with Bradbury as lovely counterpoints to contemporary apocalypticism. Technology may be evil, but these stories aren't.
@ShellenbergerMD, “Why Everything They Say About Climate Change is Wrong,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25/why-everything-they-say-about-climate-change-is-wrong/#255f82f812d6 allowed us to center from the start of the course the important middle we must navigate between climate denialism and climate fatalism/apocalypticism.
@thelindsayellis, “Independence Day vs. War of the Worlds,” is such a sharp, expansive take on what makes different apocalypses differently compelling at different times. It's so smart about 9/11, and as with all her work, so fun to teach.
LOCAL58 - COMMUNITY TELEVISION ( @krisstraub), “Contingency,” is an upsettingly visceral representation of what the militaristic destruction of America could be like, getting at the limitations of both media and state credibility. So creepy.
Jonathan Franzen, “What if We Stopped Pretending?" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending is as contrarian as you may remember it from the controversy it caused. Dark and brashly argued, the piece is compelling, despite its obvious scientific limitations. (We spent a ton of time guffawing.)
Elias Skjoldborg, “Optimistic Nihilism,” suggests that we define what makes this life worth living, giving an intimately personal take on what we can do to live a good life. It's on us. Its up to us. We decide.
@Kurz_Gesagt, “Optimistic Nihilism,” ; and “Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter,” cannily ask why we're here and argue that if we find alien life, our chances of living into the future are bleaker than we'd like.
@robinhanson, “The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?” http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html asks why we haven't found any activity of alien life, exploring how we can know our own chances for surviving long enough to spread across space. Are we out of the woods?
@jonathanwatts, “Destruction of nature as dangerous as climate change, scientists warn,” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/23/destruction-of-nature-as-dangerous-as-climate-change-scientists-warn reminds us that climate isn't the only way humanity does damage to the earth; we are responsible for so many endings, for so much destruction worldwide.
@charliejane, “As Good As New,” https://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-good-as-new-charlie-jane-anders/; and “Six Months, Three Days,” https://www.tor.com/2011/06/08/six-months-three-days/ weave eerie insights and humorous commentary, manifesting fantastic and fantastical venues for old questions and new futures. I just love “As Good As New” so much.
Douglas Preston, “The Day the Dinosuars Died,” http://newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died reminds us, in truly incredible prose, that the world has ended before in extreme and terrifying violence. And yet while much has been lost, something still endures in our archaeology.
@ThisAmerLife, “Apocalypse,” https://www.thisamericanlife.org/125/apocalypse offered my students a turn of the millennium take on end times: emphasizing the religiosity underlying it for so many in a way that surprised many of them and seemed almost quaint to me.
@okaytobesmart, “Why Are We The Only Humans Left?” gestures toward our far and complicated past, to the endings that produced us as the survivors of both lost humans and those who displaced them. We are the result of so many apocalypses.
@PBSSpaceTime, “How Will the Universe End?” attests to the fact that there are apocalyptic ends much larger than that of our own world, while tracing the process of ending that will far, far, far outlast us.
@benedictrogers, “The Nightmare of Human Organ Harvesting in China,” https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china-11549411056 grapples with the dystopic elements that currently move among us, the partial apocalypses that can so easily become mundane without our attention.
@DrFunkySpoon, “Astrobiologist Breaks Down Apocalypse Scenes from Movies,” offered my class a chance to think about the many, many, many different ways pop culture has imagined the apocalypse, as well as the science behind those varied imaginings.
@dynamicsymmetry movingly argues in the only tweet thread I assigned that the world as we know it has already ended, as we work through the distortions in our understanding of time, as we mourn our sense of reality: https://twitter.com/dynamicsymmetry/status/1244325215615713282
@TedNordhaus, “The Climate Change Apocalypse Problem,” https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2019/06/the-climate-change-apocalypse-problem/ sharply argues for a change in our rhetoric around the climate crisis, suggesting that we could emphasize the real material inconveniences that we will face unless we take real material action.
@WordsandGuitar, “After the crisis, what kind of world do we want? Post-apocalyptic novels hold lessons — and warnings,” https://cbc.ca/arts/after-the-crisis-what-kind-of-world-do-we-want-post-apocalyptic-novels-hold-lessons-and-warnings-1.5509721 framed the end of my course for me, emphasizing the inequalities of suffering we face and the mutual responsibilities we possess.
@hujane, “‘Severance’ Is the Novel of Our Current Moment—but Not for the Reasons You Think,” https://www.theringer.com/2020/3/18/21184516/severance-coronavirus-book-ling-ma opens up /Severance/ so sharply, from such wonderfully smart angles, that I can't imagine trying to sum its various arguments up. I highly recommend it.
@anthroreviewed ( @johngreen), “Humanity's Temporal Range,” https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/episodes/anthropocene-reviewed-humanitys-temporal-range meant so much to me and my class as we listened to it together, remotely. /The Anthropocene Reviewed/ has always been at the heart of my courses, and I love his emphasis on humanity's persistence.
@GretaThunberg, Speech to UN Climate Action Summit, is such a tightly written and daringly performed indictment of world leadership. Thunberg was at the heart of my course before there even was a course. We are living mid-apocalypse, but don't have to be.
@lyzl, "“It’s Always the Apocalypse,” https://forge.medium.com/its-always-the-apocalypse-c98b1c9d561d ended up being one of our most important readings of the semester. Such an emphatic, moving reminder that even as so much is ending, so much is being mended: there are beginnings in the midst of real and great loss.
@elizabethjdias, “The Apocalypse as an ‘Unveiling’: What Religion Teaches Us About the End Times,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-apocalypse-religion.html allowed my class a broader survey of apocalyptic thinking, both its present forms and its antecedents, and came just in time to help close the syllabus.
@jeffreyjcohen, “Grey (A Zombie Ecology),” filled a critical hole in my syllabus: regarding/resisting a zombie apocalypse: teasing out the tensions we face between human and nonhuman, between black and white, in the grayness of "the difficult work of composing a better present."
/Life After People/, “10,000 Years + After People,” was uniformly loathed by my students, perhaps because of its uncanny lingering in that which would remain after we are thoroughly gone, its commitment to the narrativeless, or its elongated pacing.
/The Twilight Zone/, “Time Enough At Last,” https://cbs.com/shows/the-twilight-zone-classic/video/626428813/the-twilight-zone-time-enough-at-last/ was just a fun thing to throw on at the end of the semester, but it raises such interesting questions of intelligibility, of irony, of solitude, of true endedness.
