An apocalypse reading list “

As a child, I grew up singing a song at the church that ended with the lines: “As it was at the beginning / is now and will never be / endless people, Amen.” I loved the way the song looked like a hope, a plea – not like something promised or certain. The title of my new book, Endless worldcomes from this song.

Tests in Endless world Explore a range of apocalypses: from the evangelical Christian vision of apocalypse as an end of God in the world, to secular apocalypses which take place all around us, whether through the climate crisis and the events of mass extinction, or the degradations of capitalism and the extractive industry, or the growing influence of American civic life – Sile accompanies a personal loss of faith.

I have always been attracted to books that struggle with – and seek to undermine, complicate and create new meanings from – Apocalypse visions. Here are some to consider.

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Notes of an apocalypse: a personal trip to the end of the world and back by Mark O’Connell

Mark O’Connell Notes of an apocalypse Starts: “It was the end of the world, and I was sitting on the sofa watching cartoons with my son.” The following chapters explore a myriad of apocalyptic visions. In preparation, O’Connell writes that survivors offer “not so much a prediction of the future as a deeply political interpretation of the present”. In an old army installation of the army in the black hills of the southern Dakota recently bought by a real estate magnate specializing in luxury bunkers (“a dream of fever of the depths of extracting it libertarian”), it was a logical extension of the capital itself. »»

In New Zealand, where technological billionaires like Peter Thiel buy a large area for pensions of personal apocalyptic, O’Connell writes: “(Thiel) was a pure symbol: less a real person than a screen company for a diversified portfolio of worries about the future”. In a chapter exploring the fantasies of Elon Musk of Mars colonization, O’Connell remembers a conversation he had with his five-year-old son in a museum of science: “” I do not want to go to Mars, “he said.” It doesn’t look good. “He was right, I thought.

I did not know that a book on Apocalypse could be so funny. And although I never manage to read the last chapter of the book, on parenting, without crying, the humor of O’Connell largely transforms which could be a book otherwise dark into a deeply pleasant and moving exploration of the ways in which our fantasies and our fears concerning the end (s) of the world could be instructive for the future that we create and that we live every day.

Lessons for survival: maternity against “apocalypse” By Emily Rabotau

In Survival lessons, Emily Raboteau tells the crises that overlap: white pollution and supremacy, extreme heat and flood, armed violence and gentrification and the pandemic, dementia and the death of her father. Losses on global and intimate scales, as they are still.

The structure of the book itself is a form of resistance to the apocalypse. The tests are dated, but do not seem chronologically. Many tests are fragmented in one way or another – they are made up of short entrances or are broken by the author’s photographs. As a mother of two small children, I like the way in which the fragmented forms evoke the interruptions of the care service, creating layers of time overlapping the present at random. And any resistance to chronological time – any disturbance of this one – is also a resistance to apocalyptic thought, which is based on a neat chronology from the beginning, the environment and the end.

In one of her last essays, while we cry the death of her father, Rabotae lists the forms of ambiguous loss: “Incarceration, migration, divorce, displacement, miscarriage, terrorism, dependence, pandemic, climate chaos or dementia, like my father.” Raboteau reminds the reader the way we care for ourselves and the others who hamper the ambiguous loss: “the therapeutic advice for such trauma”, she writes, “is towards resilience”.

In a coastal village of Alaska, Rabotae attends worship in a Catholic church perched on stilts. After the end of the service, the members of the Yu’Pik church told him their own losses: the river is dirty and too warm; The houses were lost due to erosion; There are fewer fish, which means less community fishing; fewer Beluga whales; Less permafrost. When she asks the Church deacon how he reconciles “the need for justice with the need for forgiveness”, he smiles, and her response echoes the Rabotau response for the loss and change of alteration. “It’s easy,” says the deacon. “We take care of each other.”

The Underow: Scenes of a slow civil war by Jeff Sharlet

The least optimistic book on the list, but the clearest and most clarifying excavation of the extreme right and its spiritual deprivation, from the emptiness of “hipster Christianity” to the “large phallic surol” red folded; The Gnosticism conspiracted from Trump’s devotees and the Gospel of the perverse prosperity of Trump gatherings where, writes Sharlet, it is as if “the loss itself, the very concept of sorrow, had been disappeared”.

I read The park A few years ago and there are specific images that I have never been able to shake: an emaciated moose covered with sparkling ticks, a family cat lying in the middle of a huge heap of weapons, a three -year -old child lying on his belly, pulling an automatic rifle. The heaviness is punctuated by the photography of Sharlet, his hysterically funny observations, as well as painfully beautiful meditations on the prophetic imagination of Harry Belafonte and occupy the demonstrators of Wall Street – which Sharlet describes as fools “in the Holy Tradition, that which does not tell the truth in power but the imagination to things.”

Sharlet writes of “The Aftermath”, looking at the deepest of the deepest of a world forged by the entangled forces of white Christian nationalism, fascism and authoritarianism. However, Sharlet makes us move forward: “We will need new songs if we want to cross what will come – what is already there.

The fungus at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The book which was my Personal Passerelle drug with apocalyptic non-fiction, The fungus at the end of the world is an innovative and layer book that evokes a current world marked by environmental degradation and capitalism, as well as a wide range of possible future expressed through the stories of Matsutake – a very precious edible mushroom – and the communities of Matsutake Pickers Tsing Meetings in Oregon, China and Finland.

Short chapters meditating on resurgence, disruption, notions of progress and the smell of Matsutake fungus are broken by the author’s own mushroom drawings; Black and white photographs of Japanese chefs, pickers armed with finish rifles and reindeer; And large -scale epigraphs citing the buyers of Laotian mushrooms, the translations of John Cage from the poetry of Basho and Samuel Beckett.

An expression of contingency, improvisation and collaboration, The fungus at the end of the world Always rethaps my own conceptions of what books can be and what stories can do and include, and how life can and will change in the face of disaster. “Neither tales of progress nor ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival,” writes Lowenhaupt Tsing. “It’s time to pay attention to picking mushrooms. Not that it will save us, but it could open our imagination. ”

Believers: make a life at the end of the world By Lisa Wells

At the start of Believers, Lisa Wells writes: “If we imagine that our civilization is already in collapse, the question we are faced with is the following: how, then, will we live?” This question, withdrawn from the Scriptures, becomes the animated question of the book As Wells meets an eccentric distribution of characters in search of alternative lifestyles which contribute to the development of all creatures.

Wells meets a “traveling outlaw” devoted to sowing the desert with edible wild flowers; She meets intentional communities of “re -hearing” Christians working in rehabilitation and decolonizing their inherited faith; She learns the art of monitoring one of the best living trackers. The accumulation of stories gives voice to the multiplicity of solutions to the countless crises with which we face. Throughout, Wells’ perspective films a needle, coming from lost idealism but “beyond cynicism or despair”.

Believers is a book of generative and apocalyptic imagination: faced with the necessary collapse of many oppressive and unbearable empires, Wells invites us to imagine new ways of living – new ways of being – in the world. “Another world arrives, the one we cannot see yet,” she writes. “This threshold asks that we imagine it anyway.”

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Endless world: Essays on Apocalypse and after by Martha Park is available from Hub City Press.