• Complain

Mark OConnell - A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

Here you can read online Mark OConnell - A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2020, publisher: Penguin Random House LLC, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Mark OConnell A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
  • Book:
    A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Penguin Random House LLC
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2020
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tenseand coming to grips with the future**Were alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A viral pandemic has the power to draw our global community to a halt. Old postwar alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look theres an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have childrennothing if not an act of hopein such unsettled times? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it?Dublin-based writer Mark OConnell is consumed by these questionsand, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilizations collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visitedreal-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering readers a unique window into our contemporary imagination.Both investigative and deeply personal, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, OConnell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isnt the end of the world?

Mark OConnell: author's other books


Who wrote A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
ALSO BY MARK OCONNELL To Be a Machine Copyright 2020 by Mark OConnell All - photo 1
ALSO BY MARK OCONNELL

To Be a Machine

Copyright 2020 by Mark OConnell All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 2

Copyright 2020 by Mark OConnell

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Cover illustration by Mara Medem

Cover design by John Fontana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: OConnell, Mark, [date] author.

Title: Notes from an apocalypse : a personal journey to the end of the world and back / Mark OConnell.

Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024066 (print) | LCCN 2019024067 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385543002 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385543019 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Survivalism. | Emergency managementSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC GF86 .O36 2020 (print) | LCC GF86 (ebook) | DDC 613.6/9dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024066

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024067

Ebook ISBN9780385543019

ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

For Amy, Mike, and Josephine

Adults keep saying: We owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I dont want your hope. I dont want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

Greta Thunberg

These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?

Annie Dillard

CONTENTS
1
TRIBULATIONS

It was the end of the world, and I was sitting on the couch watching cartoons with my son. It was late afternoon, and he was sprawled across my lap, looking at a show about a small Russian peasant girl and the comic scrapes she gets embroiled in with her long-suffering bear companion. I was holding my phone over his head, scrolling downward through my Twitter feed. The bear and the girl were involved in some kind of fishing-based slapstick escapade, in which the bear was doing a lot of stumbling about and falling over. My son was giggling happily at this, turning his face periodically upward to ensure that I was aware of the amusing pratfalls unfolding on our television screen.

On the smaller screen of my phone, I came across an embedded YouTube video on which, precisely because its accompanying text advertised it as soul-crushing and heart-wrenching, I clicked without hesitation.

As my son watched his cartoon, I held my phone above his line of vision and watched an emaciated polar bear dragging itself across a rocky terrain, falling to its knees and struggling to lift itself again, hauling its tufted carcass onward toward a cluster of rusting metal barrels half filled with trash, from which it eventually managed to paw out what looked like a knuckle of raw bone, more or less totally devoid of meat. The animal was a pathetic sight; because of the wasting effects of malnutrition, it looked more like a gargantuan stoat or weasel than a polar bear. As it slowly chewed whatever it was that it had managed to scavenge from the trash, its eyes half closed in deep and terminal fatigue, a white tide of saliva frothed slowly from its mouth, while over this footage a cello played a slow and mournful glissando.

I turned down the sound on my phone so as not to attract my sons attention, his inexorable questions. He was three then, and our relationship in those days took the form of an endless interrogation.

A text at the bottom of the screen explained that the footage was shot near an abandoned Inuit village in the northern Canadian tundra, where the bear had strayed in search of food, the population of seals, its usual food source, having been drastically diminished by the effects of climate change.

My soul remained uncrushed, my heart more or less unwrenched. I felt instead a creeping disgust at the footage itself, at the manner of its presentationthe lachrymose music, the stately pace of the editingwhich seemed designed to elicit in me a recognition of my own contribution to this terrible situation, together with a virtuous and perhaps even redemptive swelling of sorrow, of noble sadness at the ecological destruction in which I myself was playing a role. It occurred to me then that the disgust I felt was the symptom of a kind of moral vertigo, resulting from the fact that the very technology that allowed me to witness the final pathetic tribulations of this emaciated beast was in fact a cause of the animals suffering in the first place. The various rare-earth minerals that were mined for the phones components in places whose names I would never be required to learn; the fuels consumed in the course of its construction, its shipping halfway across the world, its charging with electrical current on a daily basis: it was for the sake of all this, and in my name, that the bear was starving and dragging itself across the rocky ground.

The slapstick capering of the cartoon bear my son was watching on the television screen and, above his head, the awful distress of the real bear on the smaller screen: the absurd juxtaposition of these images, simultaneously summoned from the ether and vying for attention, generated a strange emotional charge, a surge of shame and sadness at the world my son would be forced to live in, a shame and sadness that I in turn was passing on to him.

It seemed to me that I was being confronted with an impossible problem: the problem of reconciling the images on these two screens, or at least of living with the fact of their irreconcilability. The bears in his world were always hanging out with kids and having adventures, living in cabins, enduring comic mishaps, coming good in the end. The bears in mine were all rummaging in bins and starving to death. I wanted him to live in that first world, that good world, as long as possible, but I knew that soon enough he would have to leave it and live in the future. And it was not obvious to me how a person was supposed to raise children, to live and work with a sense of meaning and purpose, in the quickening shadow of that future.

It didnt take much, in those days, to set me off on a path toward the end of the world. There were frequent opportunities to indulge my tendency toward the eschatological. Cartoons, viral videos, radio news bulletins, uneasy exchanges with neighbors about how it never used to be this warm in February. So many things felt like a flashback sequence in the first act of a postapocalyptic movie, like we were living right before the events of the main timeline kicked in. I knew that this kind of thinking was as old as human civilization itself, that imagining the apocalypse was immemorially a response to times of rapid change and uncertainty. This recognition made it no less oppressive, no less real.

What did I feel when I thought about my son and his future? I felt a kind of abstract but all-consuming melancholy. My love for him felt like an insoluble moral problem. The smart money seemed to be on apocalypse, but as a parent I felt I had some kind of moral duty to be deluded about the future, to avert my gaze from the horizon. I was by no means living up to this duty.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back»

Look at similar books to A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back»

Discussion, reviews of the book A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.