There are two broad approaches in imagining the apocalypse. The first kind of story shows us the ending as a final terminus, Elvis finally leaving the building, and this time forever. In this category, we find accounts by astrophysicists of the ultimate fate of the universe, but also grim fantasies by writers like Byron and H. G. Wells that are bleakly unremitting.
The second kind of story is, surprisingly, much more common. These are works that represent the end of the world but make an exception for a chosen few; stories in which a handful of people survive the end of all things in a redoubt, or who slip away from the catastrophe through some magic escape hatch and start again. In Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves (2015), for example, something – we’re not told what, but it might be a passing black hole – rips the moon to fragments, making the annihilation of life on Earth inevitable thanks to a ‘Hard Rain’ of fragments that continues for 5,000 years. It looks like a pretty comprehensive ending of the world. However, Stephenson imagines a point beyond the end of all things in order to tell his story. He describes various small groups of people fleeing Earth in spaceships or lurking at the bottom of the ocean in submarines and then, with a bravura jump-cut, takes us fifty centuries into the future, when the survivors start recolonising the ruined Earth. In this type of story, it’s the end of the world as we know it but, somehow, we feel fine.
These two approaches reflect two main human responses to our mortality. Some of us accept our fate, either gloomily or stoically, believing it to be our final end; but others believe that the end won’t actually be the end – that we will somehow survive the ending.
Consider, for example, the recent boom in apocalypse insurance. You can take out insurance for pretty much anything, but lately some people have been insuring themselves against the end of the world.* It seems like a win–win for the insurance companies – if the world doesn’t end they don’t have to pay out, and if it does there will be nobody left to make a claim. The customers taking out the insurance must be crazy, right? Not necessarily. Insurance, after all, is buying peace of mind. Behind the policy specifics of financial reimbursement is the more fundamental consideration that there will be an afterwards in which insurance claims can be negotiated. Insurance is a mode of hope, which is our best protection in the face of extinction. Who knows? Maybe the end of the world will be a partial rather than a total phenomenon. Maybe the smart ones are those who gamble that the end of the world might be the beginning of something else.
This attitude to apocalypse, it turns out, is so far from uncommon as to be the default. St John’s Revelation at the end of the Bible rains a series of terrible destructions upon the world, obliterating life many times over, only to cap his narrative with a surprise new earth and a new heaven, a paradise for the chosen few. The same is true of the Norse myth of Ragnarök, of the film Children of Men and of George A. Romero’s zombie movie Dawn of the Dead. It’s true also of the 1998 video game Apocalypse and the alien invasion movie Independence Day (1996). It seems to me that there is an interesting paradox at work here: the end is final, and yet it also represents a strange new beginning.
This is partly down to a problem we encounter when we try to imagine the end – whether of the world or our own lives. We can only think from inside our own minds – everything we think and feel comes framed by our experiences and assumptions. No person can magically step outside their own personhood and think purely objective thoughts. We can obviously be a little more or less objective in how we think about things, but absolute objectivity is always compromised by the fact that the thinking is being undertaken by a subject.
Death is an important case of this. We can imagine dying, but we cannot imagine being dead because that, by definition, means the absence of the thinking subject. Death is not something that is lived through. Subjectivity is baked in to how we think, in the sense that we can’t remove it and keep thinking. We can, of course, imagine some of the things of life being taken away by death: light being replaced by darkness, movement being replaced by motionlessness, and so on. But we can’t imagine imagining being taken away. We can’t think about the absence of thought, by definition.
As a result, we tend to think of being dead as just another kind of being alive. We may think dying brings us out of life and to rainbow-threaded cloudy cities, with the twanging of harps. Or we may think of death as being like life, but less so: cold, denuded and bare – lying inside a coffin forever, unable to move. The Greeks thought of the afterlife in such terms. For Homer, the souls of the dead continue to exist, but in a grim, shadowy place, drained of both menos (strength) and phrenes (wit). Something similar is true in the Hebrew Bible, where both the righteous and the unrighteous dead go to the same dark place, ‘Sheol’: a lightless place cut off from life and separated from God.
But both the cliché of Christian heaven and this gloomier pre-Christian afterlife illustrate the same problem: the inability of thought to let go of the fact that it is thinking and the fallacy that we will somehow
