What would you do at the end of the world? Would you stop everything you’re doing to enjoy the last of its beauty, or would you try to save that beauty, somehow? I knew a while ago a man that is a birder, which means he goes into different pockets of wild nature and waits in silence, for birds. If we lose against climate change and face the end of this natural world, I just want to be him, go into whatever wilderness is left, and watch the birds.
While this world faces a rapid succession of destructions, and the planet is flooding and burning, would you take the present, the forests that are still there, the mountains that are still there, the life that is still possible, and sit in the middle of it all to let the waves of what remains fill you and move you? If life as we know it in this planet is in a train moving fast towards a cliff, would you then try to enjoy the view through the window or would you try to stop the train? Would you sacrifice the present to try and save the future, or would you abandon the future to enjoy the beauty that survives in the present before it is gone completely?
I’m a dreamer, always been, so I’m trying to stop the train. I know I can’t do it alone, so I joined a group that organizes to build power for regular people like me, who want to put the brakes on the engine. Sometimes, as I find myself busier and busier, I ache for the present and I just want it to stretch in front of me, free and delicious, light and carefree, unburdened and unlabeled, unspoiled by a prognosis. But as romantic as I’ve always been, as much as I’ve always preferred escaping and daydreaming, I want to face the world and this moment with clear eyes, and the shadow of the future looms in all the corners and all the details of the present. The beauty left in the present exists as an endangered beauty.
I need however to make enough room for the present because while we don’t know if this world will end, I know with certainty I will end, one day, and while the time of history is long, my time to breath and love and look at the mountains and the stars is very short. When I daydream (which I can’t stop doing), I wish I was Eve the vampire from the movie “Only lovers left alive” (if you haven’t you should watch it now, and probably stop reading this). She has eternity. She also has a lover, Adam, a vampire like her, and they’ve been alive for centuries. She loves books, he loves music, he loves science, she does, too, they touch a plant and can recite the Latin name with their eyes closed, they touch the wood in a guitar and can tell the make, the year it was built. They’ve been alive too long and have accumulated extraordinary amounts of knowledge. Now they have retreated from the world. They look at us humans, at the end of this civilization, polluting the water and our blood, heating the planet, making it ugly, not learning our lesson until it’s too late, and they call us “zombies”. Have they started the water wars yet, or are they still fighting over oil? he says, to her. Detroit, she says on the ruins of the deserted city, will raise again. “Detroit has water. When the cities in the South are burning, Detroit will bloom”. He looks at this world and it makes him suicidal because we, the zombies, make him suicidal. She, from the wisdom of her long life, reminds him that the world has collapsed before. Their time is very long. My time is short. I don’t have the comfort they find in their eternity, knowing that the world has been ruined and shaken before. I have no choice but to care about this specific world, while I see a patch of the ocean burst into flames. We are the people of this era, and only get one period of history for ourselves. They get to be sad, and we get to be terrified, as it is our world that is ending and we don’t get to see the next one, if the next one also includes humans, or mammals, or living beings with brains like our brains. She loves him and is trying to give him reasons to keep living. There is a star like a diamond, she says, that is constantly emitting the sound of a gigantic gong. The universe is vast and filled with astonishing beauty. I wish that was enough for me too, but the stars and all their wonders are too far away, and my universe is small: it’s made of the people I love (and the cat I love), who connect me to the people and the animals of this tiny planet, since our fate is linked to their fate. Adam and Eve, the two beautiful vampires, are just witnesses wondering through this world at night without belonging to this world. They belong to a world that stretches from the middle ages to the unfathomable edges of the future, they get to find comfort in the sound of a gigantic gong somewhere in the universe, because they don’t measure time through a beating heart. We only have a few decades of this 21st century world (if we´re lucky), a narrow window of years and a heart that beats quickly, relentlessly worn out, pushing both against the speed of our wreckage, and the speed of time.
