I spring into action
Like
everything else, this too shall pass. The truly revelatory content of
our apocalyptic fictions is that the world is always ending, has always
been ending, just as we are always dying—we spend our lives caught in
the doorway between death and birth. There is no solution to the riddle
of existence, nor to the inevitable fact of extinction: no amount of
sophistication can ultimately justify the suffering that is being. All
we have is compassion, patience, and the recognition that every possible
human future begins with the end of what came before.
Insofar as apophatic futurism rejects all the spurious fictions of apocalypse … it remains committed to the possibility of a new world yet to be born.*
"Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a
failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. We are surrounded by
nostalgic visions, violently nostalgic visions. Fiction can imagine
differently.... We certainly need it now. Because if we can’t imagine
desirable futures for ourselves that stand a chance of actually coming
to pass, our collective depression could well condemn humanity to a
period of terrible savagery."**
"The best thing about time passing is the privilege of
running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and
everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of
ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I'm finished. And knowing time
will go on without me.
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity."***
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity."***
LINKS
image: Maira Kalman, Principles of Uncertainty
*Beginning With the End, Roy Scranton
** New Yorker interview on Exit West
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