Last night (or rather this morning) I was watching a cheesy History Channel show about epic catastrophes, featuring grainy footage of spewing volcanoes, pounding hurricanes, awe-inspiring tsunamis, earthquakes, the eerie caprice of tornadoes, slithering mudslides, floods, the grim death ash of Herculaneum, entire Panamanian villages swept away by Hurricane Mitch, and so on. Not content with this litany of devastation, the perky host went on to describe the ravages of the Black Death, the Chinese famine in 1959-61 that killed thirty million, and helpfully provided possible scenarios for total planetary extinction from any of thousands of passing asteroids and comets.
As I tried to fall asleep I considered the idea of the disappearance of the human species. This is a hard thing to think about without succumbing to the tropes of bad television. I pictured floating snapshots, the Family of Man, tender images of vaguely ethnic children, the towheaded and the doe-eyed (that look that signifies Completely Innocent, Please Send Money), happy couples sitting on benches, an elderly gentleman playing the piano for beaming young people, bank tellers and customers smiling at each other with narcotized idiocy, and so on. So that didn't work. I took another tack, tried to personalize it. My family, reduced to gray silhouettes in the moment of a nuclear blast. No, too tired, I used to think of that one all the time. Hmm. Notable individuals from history? The best humankind has to offer, all traces of them lost as our history and achievements flicker and disappear in the mists of eternity. The marble bust of bearded Aristotle, Mozart by way of Tom Hulce, Bea Arthur in one of those weird sleeveless caftan things she always wore. No, that's not working either. Bea Arthur?
It's possible that I just can't think of such existential horrors without resorting to the trite and the hackneyed. Maybe it's a defense mechanism, or maybe I find it hard to think about humanity in the abstract. It's either going to happen or it isn't. It probably is, and there's nothing to be gained from fretting over it needlessly. We had a good run. Not, like, dinosaur good, but pretty good. People of Earth, we sure had some laughs, didn't we? Some weird scenes. What was up with that whole middle ages thing? What a waste of time that was, huh? Ha ha.
It's like a really long house party you go to somewhat reluctantly, one that starts in the afternoon and goes on till morning, some people you know and a bunch that you don't, and there are good parts and bad parts, and you could even have some pretty negative experiences and still overall have an okay time. But then it's dawn and there's nowhere to sleep and there are bottles everywhere and you have cotton mouth and just really, really want to brush your teeth and crash someplace. But where? Well, now we have an answer: Oblivion.
In case you're not around to hear it, this is the sound of the end of the world: "Ka-chunk-slosh, boom boom boom", followed by a faint "ta weeta weeta."