APOCALYPSE

“And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”

The survival I came to know on this trip was about something completely different. It was, above all, about letting yourself be affected by the changing world around you. Not just riding it out, but adapting, molting. Not succumbing to the luxury of despair, but keeping a foothold in possibility. Not blocking the world out, but letting it in.

Contemplating annihilation can certainly be a valuable means of reckoning with death, loss, abandonment and a capricious universe, but one can also detect the rumbling of a bad conscience – a dark suspicion that the end might be richly deserved. Usually, a writer will pass some kind of judgment on the world that is in peril. It is not hard to tell ... See more

Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible.

I was still reconciling our brutality against the animal as a fair trade for my needs. But the truth was that every second of my existence cost something precious, at the expense of something else equally precious. The difference is that in my modern city life, it’s usually concealed from view.

Surviving is almost entirely a mental game. Being calm, rational and able to regulate your emotions is an extremely important soft skill. Surviving is high-stress, and recognizing when the body is in psychological distress is essential.

Sometimes, the end seemed near. Others it would recede. But over the years, I began to see it wasn’t the end that was close. It was our dread of it. The apocalypse wasn’t coming: it was always with us. It arrived in a stampede of our fears, be they nuclear or biological, religious or technological.