So upon opening this blog’s home page, I realize that I only have 8 days until “graduation”! Eeek! Needless to say, my Goodreads account has already pointed out that I’m a bit too far behind in my goal of finishing 20 books by the end of the year. At this point, must.finish.The-know-It-All. This entire process has been about making concessions…
I did however, manage to finish Notes from and Apocalypse, by Mark O’Connell. I was expecting it to count as my “Science” book, but I think it only counts in so much as the common person’s sociology counts as a science.
What he was offering was, in this sense, not so much a prediction of the future as a deeply political interpretation of the present.
The book was indeed not quite what I expected. I expected more background and science about how the world might possibly end, but this book focuses more on how people might receive / are preparing for the Apocalypse (which is somewhat alluded as already happening all around us).
[I]f civilization did collapse these men would be entirely useless to themselves, and worse than useless to everyone else. What they didn’t understand, she said, was that the thing that would allow people to survive was the same thing that had always allowed people to survive: community. It was only in learning to help people, she said, in becoming indispensable to one’s fellow human beings, that you would survive the collapse of civilization.
It is an interesting anthropologic study, as half of it is this Irishman’s view of what appears to be a pretty distinctly American phenomenon.
I wondered how it was that so many Americans—educated, intelligent Americans—seemed to genuinely believe this stuff. The only thing that seemed to me to explain the conviction also fatally undermined it: the fact that from cradle to grave every American was subject to a relentless barrage of propaganda about the special freedom guaranteed them by their citizenship.
Moreover, he takes us on a trip to the places where pretty apocalyptical stuff is already happening. So in a way, it was actually another travelogue. At least I know my type!
The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”—which seemed to me to encapsulate perfectly the extent to which technological progress embedded within itself the prospect of catastrophe.
There is no way of contemplating the catastrophe of our way of life from the outside. There is no outside. Here, too, I myself am the contaminant. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.
There are just too many good quotes from this short book, view my favorites here!
The Alternative Graduate 