I started reading Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World. I have a deep love for stories of mayhem and apocalypse, so much so that a few years ago I taught a class called “Power, Chaos, and Dystopia,” in which we read about and talked about a lot of potential calamities. I find it soothing.
In Chapter 2, Lynskey discusses Mary Shelley’s The Last Man among other literary speculations about what happens to the final witness of the mess we’ve made of the world. It’s clear from Lynskey’s account that writing about the topic is doomed, fittingly. I like the idea, though. Again, I find this stuff soothing. So, I started my own. I might continue it, depending on tomorrow’s mood.
Last
I write to you, though I know you do not exist. I suppose it is boredom that compels me to write. Boredom and meaningless obligation.
Writing has no utility now. Utility no longer exists as a practical reality, except perhaps for cockroaches or something else more resilient than humans, but I haven’t seen any of them either. Perhaps I am not just the last of a species. Perhaps I am the last of the things that can be categorized into species. Utility is now a concept, not a truth.
Writing has no meaning without a reader and I will have none now. Neither reader nor meaning. So, instead I am bored and will write for the empty air, the streets and structures that will disintegrate, the river that will carry the asphalt away with the remnants of my history.
Because it now is my history. Mine alone. It belongs to no one but me. Countless souls emerging over countless years, countless conflicts and loves, countless boring days and exhilarating adventures, all leading to this. My pen and my paper. My history.
The last history.
Or not. Maybe it is your history, non-existent Earth-companion. I also write for you, Survivor, Reader. I can conceive of you even if I know you never will be. And that conception at least relieves the boredom. But it offers no utility.
When you—who do not exist—find my notebook, will the walls of this warehouse still stand? I have found a metal desk in a room. The room was once undoubtedly the office of the manager of some business that existed here. I pushed it out to the open floor, where people labored, because I choose to spend what time remains laboring. The desk looks stronger than the walls of the warehouse.
I sit at the desk now, and I will leave the notebook in the drawer when I am not writing. If the walls of this warehouse collapse before you stumble upon my desk, You Who Do Not Exist, I hope this notebook remains protected in the drawer. It might not survive, but believing it will provides me with something to hope for.
I hope for your existence and my notebook’s survival. These are concepts, not truths, but that has always been the nature of hope, even when it was prevalent and common. When people used the words “progress” and “tomorrow” unironically.
I have imagined utility as a solution to boredom. As it always was.