If you have the misfortune of spending a lot of time on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with the genre of post that goes something like, “Lol so are we just going to go to work tomorrow?” Maybe that line or one like it is imposed over a quoted tweet that says the entire Antarctic ice shelf is going to be turned into margaritas by a consortium of Alibaba and Chevron. Or maybe it stands alone, fired into the roiling ether of a website on which it often feels that everyone, everywhere, is at all times and for every possible reason predicting the end of the world.
Over 50 years ago, Frank Kermode sequenced the DNA of this kind of inherently narrative reasoning. People have always, always, always predicted that the end of the world was nearing. One reason we love to do this is because, if the end is near, what we do now takes on heightened significance. Kermode appropriated the theological concept of Kairos, or significant time, to flesh out this point:
[C]hronos is ‘passing time’ or ‘waiting time’—that which, according to Revelation, ‘shall be no more’—and kairos is the season, a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end.
Chronos is the time in which you go to work, go to the grocery store, and read this newsletter. Chronos is the mundane passage of days that we all occupy until we don’t. The exciting shit, adventures laden with meaning that resonates not only for us but for the whole world, happens in Kairos. We don’t get that precious Kairos unless we face an impending apocalypse.
It’s easy to see why we’d want to find ourselves in Kairos. What if something happened that made it clear what we had to do? What if the meaning of our actions came into focus? What if we could ourselves be someone more important? What if we could be heroes, just for one day?
Cory Doctorow understands this tantalizing allure of the apocalypse as well as any writer I’ve encountered. I recommend his 2019 book Radicalized, a collection of four sci-fi novellas, for being a good read, but also because the final story feels uncannily timely. And not just because it prominently features a deadly plague.
The Masque of the Red Death borrows its title from Poe but its sensibility from deadpan satire in the vein of Christopher Guest. It’s narrated in the third person, sticking fairly close to Martin, the Phoenix-area finance guy who founds Fort Doom, a prepper bunker that he plans to fill with his affluent professional friends in the event that civilization begins to teeter. The collapse Martin wanted arrives, and he gleefully dives into putting all of his theories into practice.
A lot of these theories revolve around his own superiority, even relative to the supposed elite Martin has brought into his chemical-toilet fold. From the beginning, as his friends arrive in his fiefdom—which is much better equipped to blow up possible assailants than it is to do such trivial things as grow food—Martin is obsessed with maintaining his own standing. He has the nicest room at Fort Doom, he has his eye on carefully chosen single women on his invite list, and he makes life-or-death decisions with credibility as a leader as his first concern. Martin is an intensely dislikable man, but so are most of his compatriots. These are rich people who can’t quite afford their own private Peter Thiel-caliber bunker, but who deeply believe that having ably manned a spreadsheet in the before times qualifies them to rule over the ashes.
Even as things go awry, Martin refuses to reimagine the end of civilization as anything other than an opportunity to establish how much better he is than everyone else. This passage comes late in the story, after plenty of things have gone badly for these hedge fund refugees:
That was Martin’s plan, after all: wait for order to reassert itself, then emerge with all the necessities for securing a place in it: trade goods, bearer bonds, cash money, and his wits, all backed by a loyal group of followers who knew how to fire every gun in Fort Doom’s substantial armory.
Civilizations had risen and fallen before. Humanity needed to work together, but hell was other people. When the best people were on top, things worked: they convinced the rational, cajoled the stubborn, and, frankly, forced the rest. It was for the greater good. Put one of the losers, the takers, at the top of the pile, and they’d lead the rest into catastrophe. One thing had been very clear to Martin through all his life: the takers were steering the ship, and they were going to crash it.
In that first paragraph, we get the reason why Martin invested in filling his fortress with gemstones rather than learning hydroponics. He believes that he will prevail in the new world using much the same tools that served him in the old. In the second, we come to understand that a man who is in an increasingly precarious position and is ever more clearly dependent—reliant on exploiting his fellow Fort Doom residents and on trade with outsiders who actually know how to grow food and do other useful things—still believes he’s a maker rather than a taker.
It turns out that we don’t strictly need hedge funds, but we do need people who grow and pick fruit. That’s hard to admit if you owe what you have to the finance industry, of course. No one should be more invested in the status quo than these characters, who have been so fortunate in Our Society. Yet they’ve deluded themselves into believing they'll be even more decisively the chosen ones in what comes next. They believe they want different identities, and that the end of days would give them exactly that, awash in newfound meaning and purpose. But what they really want is more of what they already had—and when the deflating reality of what they so tenuously had and were becomes clear, they want to do anything but face it.
I say all of this partly to join Doctorow in the good fun of skewering his contemptible characters, but also to drive home the deeper stakes of thinking eschatologically. Are any of us, whether or not we’re more admirable than Martin, really promised greater purpose and meaning in a time of apocalyptic crisis? Are we going to get a shiny new identity? Are we going to become characters in a better story?
Maybe we really do want an apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to get one, or get the one we want. Once we admit to ourselves that we’re always living through one crisis or another, and that the past looks stable only because it’s past, the siren song of eschatological narrative becomes muted. Stories are good at organizing and embodying information about the past and present, such as the undeniable fact that we’re as obsessed with apocalypse as ever. They’re much less good at predicting the future. I don’t know when or how our civilization will end, but I do know that it’s unlikely to be prophesied by a story as tidy as the ones we’ve become so good at telling.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
I searched “Calvin and Hobbes apocalypse” and this was one of the few results:
Not sure who key-worded “apocalypse” into this strip, but I salute you. It was definitely an apocalypse for Tommy Chesnutt, may the tiger god rest his soul.
This one is from December 1985, so we’re looking at very early Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson is tinkering with a different tone than the the thwarted-yet-defiant drollery that would come to permeate Calvin’s sensibility. Calvin seems blithely assured in a way that would eventually feature in the strip only as a means to set him up to fail.
Here we have the glimmers of something entirely different than what Calvin and Hobbes became: A true kick-ass hero-and-sidekick dynamic in which Hobbes physically protects Calvin. Did Watterson initially want the death of Tommy Chesnutt to be a real narrative occurrence, rather than just a punchline? We’ll never know, but we do know that the rest of the run of the comic rules out eating people as one of Hobbes’s powers. One of the many tantalizing things about Hobbes is that he’s an indefatigable ally of Calvin but that he can’t do anything for him in the reality that’s real to everyone else.
Would Calvin and Hobbes have been better if Hobbes were realer? It’s one of the strip’s most persistent questions, and not as easily answered by “well it worked out great as it was, so shut up” as you may insist. Or maybe it is, but I’m feeling wistful imagining a Hobbes who could slip the bonds of being real only to Calvin. Even if it cost Tommy Chesnutt everything.
Other fun things:
(There’s a theme to this week’s links. Forgive me if you wanted actual “fun,” I’ll try to bring more of that next week. Also the poem below is fun!)
— My buddy Linda Tirado lost her eye during a protest last week. Here are her eloquent, uncompromising thoughts on that
— The spirit of Gawker lives on in Gizmodo’s investigation of a very curious PR campaign by Austin PD
— Patrick Wyman, the accomplished history podcaster and all-around Renaissance man, recently launched a newsletter of his own. He’s a heavyweight when it comes to historical analysis, and he’s begun by tackling the issues of the day
A poem:
Izumi Shikibu lived in the 11th-century and still goes hard