Abstract
Abstract This article explores some eschatological facets of vehicle/road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a disappearing form of travel in the twenty-first century (at least in the Western world), serves as a memento mori metaphor for our post-COVID era. There are plenty of death-memory features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns, and the search to escape social constraint through adventure, memento mori lurks/lingers near spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. As an art-historical and theological notion, it is inherently material and incorporates both eschatology and remembering. As a pragmatic act of embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialized as an endangered transgression and dying-out form of displacement. Hitchhiking is thus a socio-spatial memento mori for an epoch during which it is increasingly presented “virtually” in re-representational forms. I therefore propose that this phenomenon is a simulacrum, offering topical allegorical tristesse lessons for considering global annihilation.
Published Version
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