Viewing the Apocalypse

Last night, after a long day of trying to pull the house together for our Music Week guests that arrive today, we settled in to watch The Last of Us.  I got the whole first season on DVD from the public library.  I hesitated to start watching the series because I was worried that we would stay up all night watching all the episodes.

I needn't have worried.  It was good, I guess.  But when the first episode ended, I decided not to watch the next one.  I want to keep watching, I think.  But as with so many TV series, I had heard such good reviews and felt a bit underwhelmed when I finally watched it.

I felt the same way about Station Eleven, where I didn't even finish the first episode.  This morning I wondered if perhaps my tastes are changing--am I no longer in the mood for a good apocalypse?  No, I still like the idea of apocalyptic story lines.  Do I no longer have the attention span for a series as opposed to a movie?  I don't think so.  Hmm.

As I watched the first episode yesterday, I thought about the quick beginning of most apocalyptic scenarios.  The world is normal, and then suddenly everyone is attacking everyone and burning up the city and there are soldiers trying to keep order.  

I suspect the end of the world will be a much slower event.  I remember some electrifying emotions at the beginning of the pandemic, as I kept track of rising numbers, at first writing them down on an envelope that I still have somewhere.  I remember thinking about how I've been waiting for this moment, that moment when the new disease, the new weapon, the new war comes.  And it has all unspooled in a much slower way than I expected.  We've had a disease that inspired a quick response in terms of vaccine development.  It's still unspooling, but even with no vaccine, the mortality rate is not nearly as high as the diseases that are often imagined for apocalyptic scenarios.

Similarly, the war in Ukraine has been less apocalyptic than I was expecting, although I'm sure that Ukrainians would disagree.  And I do realize we may not have gotten to the end of the world part of the war yet.

I'm also thinking of watching Cold Mountain a few weeks ago, an apocalypse of a different sort, the war begins rather suddenly, but then the end of the world just grinds on and on.  I remember the scene where the Civil War soldier shows up at the home of an older woman along the way.  She has herbs drying in her cozy cottage, and she rubs a salve into his wounds which seems to heal him much more quickly than he had been healing.  I thought, I need that recipe!

On Independence Day, my neighborhood friend and I briefly talked about politics before moving on to more pleasant topics.  I said that I dreaded the bad times that I thought might be coming, but that I had advantages that others wouldn't have (like a house that is paid for and money in the bank and my skin color and my older age), that I thought we would be safe in our corner of the mountains.  My friend said, "If anything happens to Social Security, I'm not sure what will happen."  I am not eligible to collect those benefits yet, but at this point in the life of our nation, I'm inclined to start collecting at the first minute I am eligible.

All of my reading and viewing should remind me that it's almost impossible to plan for an apocalypse.  It will almost always unspool in ways we don't expect.  Still, it's impossible for my brain to stop planning--which may explain my love of the genre.