Blooming Doomsday

With the world ending and all it's getting harder and harder to write for posterity. Global warming, nuclear proliferation, the Doomsday clock going Daylight Saving Time, and other pressures on our existence, are creating an inhospitable environment for the writer who hopes to be appreciated by readers of tomorrow. From the look of things, by tomorrow there won't be any readers. But if by the grace of a strengthened Kyoto Protocol there are still literate people alive you can be assured these privileged survivors will be too busy looting, drinking, smoking, crying, sobbing, sun-bathing, praying, and freely fornicating to bother curling up in the passenger seat of an abandoned Mercury Mountaineer with your dense and highly literary book. They won't have time to read the novel's footnotes when they're living out the footnote of human history. Without posthumous fame and appreciation is there even a reason to write?

The short answer is no. The long answer is no I don't think so. The answer is strongly influenced by the criteria of the question. It's my opinion one should never write for posterity. For one thing, you'll never see any of that money. And only the very devout believe, as some religious texts claim, God reserves Heaven's best seats for writers, where they can, without obstruction, observe later generations of readers increasing their posthumous fame. Observe, however, that these books were all written by writers, many of whom were likely considering their own posthumous fame in writing that passage.

It's with some anxiety, then, that certain literary writers observe the end of human life. In situations like these sometimes all that's needed is a change in perspective—the proverbial frown inversion. With the decimation of the planet comes an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to refocus one's literary efforts. While not a novel idea, perhaps writers should reconsider the aesthetic whims of the living. There is much to be gained. Money, for instance. You can still address the big human issues affecting us today. War, famine, greed, these are still viable subjects. Add one thing—a hero, who, with a little bit of wit and a measured amount of muscle, can overcome the big bad blank. Envisage an actor who might play your hero. Tom Hanks is good. So is Tom Cruise, but not so much. Consider carefully because you'll get more money if your book's made into a movie. Videogames might follow. At night, you can nestle your sleepy head in the nooks of the embossed title of your latest thriller. And do not worry about that other quote from the holy book "Lay not up for yourselves literary treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal." Moths have been genetically engineered away from book consumption to use in ethanol production. Metals are for missiles and only the most desperate of thieves would rob a bookstore.

Another option might exist. The hyper-literate indulges the intellect and the bestseller boils the blood but what pricks the space between these two? It won't be that which hatches elaborate plans or bullies others with a shaking fist. It's a kind of literature that shows its reader that life is present beneath the surface of facts and rising sea levels. This kind of literature proves, by eliciting an elusive tremor in that place not intellectual and not excitable, that our experience of life exists only marginally within the knowable world. There is a whole other margin, and by writing in it, there is some profit.

Nabokov, a victim sometimes of his own intellect, provides an incomplete definition of this writer—"A creative writer, creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way to what…" The editor notes that at this point two pages are missing from Nabokov's manuscript. But in a moment of inspiration, he finishes the paragraph with this later fragment—"under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."

Perhaps the future isn't bleak ... just a little overcast. In the end we've still got love and beauty, and we can walk hand-in-hand while we learn the ins and outs of this new planet.

Two blank pages between then and now. Time to start writing.