Against the End of the World

Abstract

Because it's difficult to think of the earth as doomed, the velvet summer too plush, the willow branches swishing like hula skirts, and everyone scuttling through the days, our legs quick as second hands, all the countless revolutions. Endings are as inevitable as they are invisible. But the visible so expansive, infinite as a heron's wingspan blurred into sky, as pointed as a butterfly tongue dipped into a honeyed pool of nectar. How each seen thing seems evidence of permanence. How a stream whittled down to a trickle can only ever be a temporary lack, the seasons and cycles too familiar, any deviation nothing more than a blip on a long, eternal round. It's not that I haven't read the books, or learned the science, not as though I don't believe the graphing of Earth's history into neat, doomed lines. It's just that the other day I walked among a quiver of trees, and despite the radar's distant threat of rain, the breeze felt as though an idle god waved a paper fan over the earth, and the person I walked next to was present and solid and beautiful. “I keep reading the news,” she said, “and I really think the earth is doomed.” And I thought yes, she is right, the earth is likely doomed. The thought slid through me the way the breeze slipped along its silken currents, and the trees lining the trail shook their leaves and sighed.Because it's easy, in times like these, to prefer the tactile fact. I like my data to grow on trees, to measure the world through their bud, bloom, and sleep. I prefer the grammar of rustle and feather, the cattails along a pond lined up like a bar graph. I like my evidence served like grapes, on a silver platter and tender enough to go down easily. Not the rush of figures and facts swirling like riptides under raging dams, but the ease of walks by quiet rivers, all the pleasures of pretense. I admit, sometimes I favor Wordsworth over Thoreau, because I like my nature full of gods instead of humans. I want this moment, walking beside this timeless person, to be full of the illusion that the tenuous roots between us will hold. To be less about ruin and more about lyric, because Romanticism was an affable theory, when what we knew was beautiful, and how we knew it, as simple as walking outside. Because when I occasionally interpret a rumble of thunder to be the growl of a hungry god, or lightning a flash of lust in her eye, or a tornado the swirl of her frantic anger, how coherent, to see it all through my own incredulous eye.Because the trail that day was almost mythical. Of course, I suppose that was her point. That the present turns to legend, as imperceptibly as the earth rotates into tomorrow. That she and I, and all the people we passed cycling along the path, will become characters in a story that starts with Once. We know and we know, and still we spin our data into odes. Even when so much is calculable in the crimson echo of cardinal and pondberry. “Every day I read some new terrible thing,” she said as we walked, just as the trail dipped under a bridge. Suddenly, she stopped, and with theatrical gloom cupped her hands around her mouth and cried, “The world is doomed!” The echoes bounced off the piers like basketballs, doomed, doomed, doomed.“You sound like an apocalyptic prophet,” I said, and she laughed, and this is why. Because we prefer our doom to be abstract and ironic, like when a beautiful, solid person walking along a manicured trail on a lush, 75-degree day, sighs and says, “I think the earth is doomed.” If only permanence wasn't so imaginable. When we emerged from under the bridge, we saw the prophesied rain cloud ahead, the color of scorched concrete, staggering toward us with its wailing burden. The trees above us turned their leaves and huddled. And I confess, I took a quickened breath; a sudden urge beat through me, to reach out, clasp her hand, and run. Not because of the storm. Because if the trail in front of us was going to unravel, and the earth underneath us about to crumble, then all I wanted was to feel our fingers intertwined as we fled, to know the feel of fact beneath our feet.