I Can’t Stop Thinking About The End of the World — and Old Soda Cans
We have to do better.
There’s a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road that I’ve thought about often over the last year. The main character and his son (a boy) find an abandoned underground bunker, stocked with everything they need for the foreseeable future. They know they can’t stay. After all, if they found the place, it’s only a matter of time before someone else does. So they take what they can carry. That’s when they discover something.
A can of soda.
The boy has never tried soda. The main character lets him drink it all. When he’s done he says, “It’s really good.”
And they move on.
It’s a startling moment because it reveals exactly what a real apocalypse would feel like for a lot of us. We’re not going to be running from fire and ash sprinkling down on us from sulfur clouds.
It’s going to be slow.
It’s going to include moments where we remember the simple pleasures we took for granted, and we’ll pretend not to be sad.
These days, I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to be me someday. I’m going to be sharing a small glimpse of a bygone world with my daughter. Maybe it won’t be a soda. It’ll be a video of some animal that’s gone…