“Survival is insufficient.” - Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Also from Star Trek Voyager)
This quote is the cornerstone of Station Eleven, the theme: Survival is not enough, one must live! It’s a strange idea in a post-apocalyptic world. How do you live when everyone, and everything is dying all around you? How do you find the will to keep going?
The answer is hope.
For those of you who don’t know Station Eleven it is a genius novel set along the timeline of a deadly virus wiping out the vast majority of humanity, ending civilization in any form we know. The story bounces back and forth from before the virus to after, providing context, depth, and a vast contrast from the world before to the world after. (Quite honestly the plotting of this novel is a masterclass in story telling and I will likely write another post just dedicated to that in the future!) In this story there is a group of traveling actors and musicians called The Traveling Symphony who travel each year along a preset path of settlements where they perform, of all things, Shakespeare. I will talk more about the pure amazingness of this novel at another time, but for now I want to focus purely on this theme of hope.
Hope is a strange thing. In some ways it feels like the belief in good things despite everything else. Hope feels blind at times; how in spite of this world, can we believe that things will be ok? How in a world when everyone around us has died, can we believe that we can do more than simply survive? How does this not feel naive? But the truth is, we would all go mad without hope. Hope is what keeps us from watching the world around us burn and jump into the fire with it.
This is a feeling I can relate to pretty heavily. It’s hard to feel hopeful. It seems the more I pay attention to the world around me, the more hopeless I tend to feel. So what’s the alternative, bury my head in the sand? The world really is burning all around us, and we are running out of water to put out the flames, and those with the power to save us are busy throwing gasoline. I ruminate, and obsess, and I feel heartbroken every time I look at my daughter and wonder what the future will hold for her.
Hope can feel unreachable for me. Admittedly, I do feel like it drives me mad.
The hope is not in the salvation of society, the hope is the perseverance. Despite the destruction of the world, life will go on. There is still sunlight at the end of this tunnel.
This is the point of Station Eleven: despite the world ending, life still continues. There is still room for art, love, music: meaning.
Just imagine how much more difficult this story would be without that hope. The world has ended, and the people leftover submit to merely existing, survival. Despite the state of the world, there is still heart.
In this reality it is more important now than ever to believe in hope. Hope might seem naive, but hope is what keeps us going. Hope is what gives me drive when I look at my daughter to fight this world for her. Hope is what gives me drive when I’m teaching, that these students can make a difference. Hope tells me that even with those who pour gasoline on the fire, there can still be life in spite of them.
Personally, I love apocalyptic fiction in most of its forms. I even love many apocalyptic story that don’t have this hope at the heart of it. One book that comes to mind, is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
I loved The Road when I read it. But I also felt pretty raw afterwards. Like Station Eleven there has been some kind of cataclysmic event that has wiped out civilization and most of humanity, but unlike Station Eleven, survival is the only option. The story follows a father and his son as they travel along the road, surviving. It’s bleak, and dark, and virtually every bad thing that can happen happens. Even still, there is a bit of hope at the end, hope of simple survival, but still a slight light at the end.
For those wondering, (no one) there is a character in the book who has lost his glasses and therefore can’t see anything as he travels, and that hit a little too close to home for me. I wouldn’t last long without my glasses.
There is a place for stories like this, and I’ve read many of them, but sometimes it’s nice to not feel existentially doomed when I read.
Recently I listened to an audiobook about the potential effects of unabated climate change bluntly titled: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. The outlook is pretty bleak. Essentially if we continue on the path we are on, by 2100 we will live on a planet where giant swaths of it will be unable to support human life due to heating, and other climate extreme events. Even in this book where hope seems unreachable, the author places a lot of emphasis on the not-quite-hopelessness of it all. While warming is inevitable, the worst effects of it can still be mitigated by action. So that’s something at least.
Writing Hope
There is a novel I’m writing currently. It is a post civilization story, in it I’ve unloaded much of my anxiety and fear about climate change, and the generally destructive predispositions of humanity. I’m reflecting now on my story after reading Station Eleven and I have to ask myself: How much hope is in this story? Admittedly, to me at least, not enough. This is what revisions are for.
The point of my story is not that the world has ended, the point of my story is that we don’t need civilization to live meaningful lives, to love, and create meaning for ourselves. It isn’t humanity that is the problem, humans are as much the curse as we are the antidote. In any story that is predicated on the destruction of civilization there is required a degree of sympathetic humanity. Why do we care about people? People are complex and the good can exist simultaneously with the evil inside of a single person. The goal of the writer is to bring out both sides of the characters, create a wholeness of character. With something as complex as an apocalypse, you can’t afford to have any one dimensional characters. These dimensions provide you with that needed hope.
It is paramount to believe in a future. How can we live without believing that we have something to live for? We wish, we dream, we hope. We write.
“I am alone, the roads are bare, but I have a guitar strapped to my back, and I will sing for someone, someday.” - The Reclamation by Bryan Crumpley
What do you think? What are some apocalyptic stories that you’ve read that have this kind of hope?
It might be time for you to listen to "Hope" from Klaatu.