been reading this guy for some time. a vietnamese refugee from the seventies who has lived everywhere, including philadelphia, now returned to vietnam, writing about the end of the world and immigration;


With its eschatological Bible, the West is constantly haunted by its death and hypothetical rebirth. Its apocalyptic imagination is unmatched.

Christianity promises a frightful ending, as in, “Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake. (Revelation 8:5) The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. (Revelation 8:7) The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, (Revelation 8:8) a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. (Revelation 8:9)”

Downright evil. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you certainly get a variation of all this, though its first impact is only tersely described, “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions [...] He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go.” With electricity and running water gone, everyone’s long slide from modernity begins.

That “long shear of light” was either a meteor or, more likely, an atomic bomb. Desperately wandering through a world of ash, soot, slush and blocked sunlight, a father and son would discover the cataclysm’s ghastly results, such as, “The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk [...] The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”

Father and son are trapped in a man-eat-man world, and not just metaphorically, as we are. Essentially Christian, they reassure themselves they’re still the “good guys,” for they won’t rob, murder or eat other people, and that they’re “carrying the fire.” When the father finally dies, the son is adopted into a Christian band, but this soothing ending runs counter to the Hobbesian tenor of all the other pages. The boy should starve to death, if not be butchered and eaten by feral humans.

This salvaged faith in Christ and man is not as convincing as the father’s epiphany, halfway through, “He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”.............http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/