Despite the end. A personal essay about the end of life and the world.

It was a strange year. Temperatures across Europe hit record highs, prolonged droughts destroyed crops, and wildfires consumed forests. Military conflicts and genocides persisted worldwide; the cucumber season knows no killing. Fascist politicians grew louder and bolder. And I was losing my mother.

At the beginning of this year, literary historian and theorist Ed Solomon published a book Writing during the Apocalypse. Reflections on the Great Unraveling, in which he asks himself whether, in today's age, which bears all the signs of an impending end of civilization, it still makes sense to write and create. Why bother when extinction is knocking at the door, and there will be no one left to read books? How to fight literature against processes that cannot be reversed? What can poetry do in the face of helplessness?

Solomon records symptoms of the expected global destruction and hears it in the gallop of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in this case: war, pandemic, unregulated technologies, and climate crisis. Each rider is given a section of the book, in which he also offers, if not antidotes, then at least soothing remedies: writing as protest, as memory preservation, as meaning creation, and as value safeguarding. But what to do when medicines and comforting measures are no longer available?

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

A few days before the end of the school year, my mother began having coordination problems, her head was spinning, and she preferred to go to school by bus. She was a homeroom teacher; her ninth graders were just saying goodbye to elementary school, and she wanted to be there. When she found out she couldn't sign the report cards for the students, she was hospitalized. In the hospital, she was diagnosed with a very rare neurodegenerative disease affecting about one in a million people. It progresses very quickly, usually appears spontaneously, without cause or warning, and is always fatal. There is no cure for it. Most patients live three to six months after the disease manifests, but in some cases, much less.

At that moment, my mother had seven weeks left to live.

It was seven very fast and at the same time very slow weeks. We tried to keep pace with the disease, which was always one step ahead. Mama was losing motor and cognitive abilities much faster than we could adapt.

One life and one world was collapsing before our eyes, and most of the time we could only helplessly watch.

During this summer, I naturally didn't have much time or capacity to read; my mother soon required continuous care. One of the few books I managed to read was Solomon's reflections on the end of the world and the role of art in this time of crisis. It is based on the observation, now very widespread, that the horsemen of the apocalypse never gallop alone. The crises shaping our present not only happen simultaneously but also influence each other, strengthen each other, and grow exponentially. They flourish like tumors that cannot be stopped. Today, we call this polycrisis.

We understand some of it, we can explain it rationally. Technocratic oligarchy supports authoritarian regimes, which then wage wars and contribute to worsening the climate crisis. Victims of conflicts and climate change leave their homes, and their migration is used by authoritarian politicians to stoke hatred, racism, and injustice, which ultimately again benefits the new technocratic elite. A vicious circle we watch helplessly every day in the news.

Much of this, however, happens at the level of cold, mediated information and facts; often, we may feel that it doesn't directly affect our lives too much. But behind the scenes, it constantly sounds like ticking clocks in an old house, like the hum of a fan in a hospital room. I thought about this during this summer, when, to my surprise, the world did not stop in the background of my mother's rapidly advancing illness—in fact, it worsened the situation, quite critical in itself.

Although I largely ignored world events, their influence was undeniable. I thought about it when I was taking my mother to one of many examinations, and the radio was talking about increasing tensions between the United States and Iran and about renewed fighting. I realized it when I was reading reports about ongoing genocide in Gaza in the hospital waiting room. When I learned about floods and fires. Yes, these are still just information, reports that flood us whether someone is dying or not. But in moments when death sits in the same room with you, you more intensely realize what these constant catastrophic news do to you, what kind of death-filled world you live in. How much this world of destruction and cruelty shapes your view of life, your mood, your ability to defend yourself against personal tragedies.

“If a person knows they will be hanged in two weeks, they can focus amazingly well,” says James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson. I think this applies not only to piercing insight, as Boswell suggests, but also to a higher degree of vulnerability and sensitivity. When we are close to death, we perceive it more intensely even behind the walls of our homes and beyond the borders of our countries. And vice versa. The personal has long been political, and the political echoes in the personal. There is nowhere to run from some of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

But that is still “only” the impact of polycrisis on mental health, on mind and spirit. I began to experience Solomon's reflections much more intensely when temperatures rose in Bratislava and Slovak temperature records fell in the middle of summer. At the beginning of August, the heat in the capital reached nearly 41 degrees Celsius. At that time, my mother was already completely immobile and lay all day on her bed in her Petržalka apartment. Extreme heat is challenging for almost everyone, but we know it hits the most vulnerable hardest. A healthy person can at least somewhat mitigate its effects—go to the forest, find shade, take a bath—but a helpless person finds no refuge from it. My brother-in-law finally brought a portable air conditioner into her overheated room, but that was not an ideal solution either—the room cools relatively quickly, but it’s an unnatural cold that a healthy person can just about handle; an immobile person soon begins to suffer from hypothermia. And no regulation or pressing all possible buttons helps; a motionless body cools with a terrifying premonition.

On one's own skin, and on the skin of a loved one, one learns the truth that climate skeptics and many liberals refuse to hear: no, technologies will not save us from the consequences of the climate catastrophe. Neither simple ones like air conditioning nor the most sophisticated. Especially not when we are sick, old, poor, and vulnerable.

Living River

These are just some examples of the convergence of global crises and personal tragedy I observed during the summer; I would rather not speak of others. However, similar overlaps are surely experienced daily by millions of people around the world, especially in regions more affected by global crises than a small Central European country. The question I often asked myself during those weeks—and which is also a leitmotif of Solomon's book—is: what role can art, especially writing, play in this infiltration of the global into the intimate, the apocalyptic into the personal?

As I mentioned above, Ed Solomon sees the soothing possibilities of literature in its ability to relate to the past (memory preservation, value conservation), respond to the present (protest writing), and look into the future (search for meaning). It is not a panacea, and I often had the impression from the author's writing that he is grasping at straws rather than offering convinced answers. But it is at least something.

Perhaps there is no light at the end of the tunnel, but that doesn't mean we have to stumble around in darkness all the time.

Thanks to the plague, we have Boccaccio's Decameron; World War I, besides immense suffering, brought us Remarque's novels. Is this an adequate patch for the horrors endured? Not at all. It is always little, always late. But it is one of the few ways to give at least a hint of meaning to a senseless world.

American poet Wallace Stevens writes in one poem that death is the mother of beauty. Only because of impermanence can we discover beauty in things and people—eternal things we do not value. And the closer death, of our loved ones and the planet, comes, the more receptive we can be to beauty. It is a similar insight to Boswell's—through a noose around the neck, we perceive more sharply (Fučík knew this well), and this applies not only to social and interpersonal relationships but also to the beauty of a departing world.

We can glimpse similarities that would otherwise escape us, and they can teach us something. For example, I clearly perceived parallels between the fate awaiting all of us (and especially future generations) in a world of extreme climate change, and what unexpected illness prepared for my mother. Both processes were brutally fast, much faster than experts predicted. In both, the individual can feel helpless, facing something larger than themselves, with no way to defend or help. As I already mentioned regarding the portable air conditioner, technologies do not help; the destruction advances too quickly. Every device we obtained and wanted to ease my mother's last days—whether a wheelchair or a portable toilet—proved ineffective within days, as the disease worsened at a lightning pace.

Similarly to the now inevitable climate catastrophe, individual actions change nothing fundamentally. You can separate waste, eat sustainably, avoid flying, sign petitions to reduce carbon footprint, but nothing will change the irreversible effects of climate change. Yet, that does not mean it is pointless to do so, however paradoxical it sounds. We cannot prevent the death of our loved ones or the loss of biodiversity, but we can learn to accept it.

And acceptance is not resignation.

Acceptance can be a creative, productive process in which we find new meaning for ourselves—and ideally for others—in small details, in nuances.

In the last days of her life, my mother could hardly communicate at all, so every word of hers was precious. It gained unexpected meanings. About three weeks before her death, we had a conversation in which she managed to say a few somewhat coherent sentences. It is more important to me than hundreds of hours of conversations we had when she was healthy.

After the funeral, I needed to get out of Bratislava; my wife and I went to Moravia for a few days. Near the village of Radějov, we went for a walk in the surrounding nature. I found online that people recommend a walk called the Moon Valley, through which flows the Mandát River. It is said to be a beautiful trip, with the sound of the river in the forest. The walk was nice, but the river did not murmur; the bed was completely dried up, as was the larger Radějovka River flowing through the village. The Moon Valley fulfilled its name—quiet, arid, somehow ominous.

A few days later, we found ourselves in Orava, near Oravská Polhora, again on a forest walk. Along the hiking trail, we came across a river, also largely dried up but not completely. A weak current still wetted the stony bed, and plants still greened in it. I don't remember the last time I was so happy to see a river in motion. Despite everything, it still lived.

Learning to Die

Being aware of beauty against the backdrop of decay is, of course, possible even without art, without literature. But its presence, its existence, can help a person. Besides Solomon's essays, I read during the summer the novel Friend from the House of Sorrow, in which Eva Kantůrková records her experiences from the normalization prison, and shortly after my mother's death, the novella There by Nicol Hochholczerová, in which the author grapples with her grandfather's death. The time spent with these books helped me, not only because their themes were close to me—but also because I was more about the time spent than active reading. The awareness that they exist, that someone creates despite difficult, critical, tragic conditions, that this creation communicates with someone, even across the chasm of time, space, and death, helped me. “Writing is sacred because it is a ritual of giving birth to meaning. Sometimes, it contains such grace that someone finds comfort in the act itself, in the encounter with another person. Words and stories are as important as they have always been, because if they mean something to one person, it doesn't matter that they mean nothing to everyone else,” Solomon says in one of the most beautiful passages of the book.

Writing and reading as acts of mercy—what more could we hope to find in the ruins of a collapsing world?

The famous Montaigne maxim says that studying philosophy means learning to die. But at the end of one civilization, at the end of one life, philosophy and art can also teach us the opposite—that is, how to (still) live. What it means to accept the inevitable, yet not give up; what it means to find beauty in decay and hope in despair; what it means to create despite the demise.