The birdcage is the usual one on these spring days; it's sunny and there's no north wind blowing. Suddenly, I hear my roommate hurrying up the stairs. He opens the study door and says, harried, "You haven't heard anything, have you? The power's gone out everywhere." In our one-street village, activity hadn't changed much. The swallows were chirping, I was working at my desk, Pedro was in the vegetable garden. Everyone was calm. On the other hand, my roommate, who had been coming from Banyoles, where everyone was busy, and who had listened to the radio on the way home in the car, had the apocalypse on his mind. Cyberattack, chaos, uncertainty.
Apocalyptic imaginings are millennia old, but it's since Romanticism that they have become omnipresent in our cultural system. In the 18th century, philosophical and artistic works began to appear related to an idea that is at the heart of our apocalyptic terror: the sublime. Although today we use the adjective sublime as a synonym forsublimeThe sublime is a concept that has been key in the history of art and ideas. In nominalized usage, "the sublime" refers to the sensations of fear and wonder imposed on us by the ferocity or immensity of natural elements (to cite just a few examples: high mountains, the ocean, or a storm). In short, the sublime is the central sensation in scenes that remind us, very explicitly, of our smallness, our extreme fragility.
The idea of the sublime already appears in Homer and the Bible—is there any example of apocalyptic sublime more paradigmatic than the Last Judgment?—and although it may seem like an outdated concept, the scenarios that derive from it remain very much alive in contemporary society. Since the sublime refers to an encounter with everything that surpasses our cognitive capacity, it is also suitable for explaining our impressions of the landscapes of the technosphere. For most inhabitants of the Global North, our daily sublime isn't "natural"; it's the result of the network of cables, satellites, and chips that allows us to compress space-time. But a disconnection like Monday's demonstrates that the invisible—incomprehensible—energy that powers this entire structure we've created in just over a century has become indispensable to us. If it fails systemically, it can provoke a state of chaos similar to a natural disaster.
In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron wrote Darkness, an eighty-two-line poem that until the 1990s had been understood as a mere apocalyptic fiction, but which was completely anchored in the reality of what is now known as "the year without a summer." In 1815, there was a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, which had killed tens of thousands of people, darkened the sky for months, and altered the planet's climate, with devastating consequences for agriculture. Faced with darkness and uncertainty, as occurred for a few moments this past Monday, the idea of the apocalypse took hold of everyone. However, then the imaginative predictions came true. The famine that caused the failure of crops was added to the havoc wrought by the Napoleonic Wars. Byron transformed the feelings of Europeans at that time into a few extremely cruel verses (unpublished translation by Enric Casasses): "War, which had not been for some time, / flooded everything, and bought its food / making blood flow, and gorged itself alone / sullen and disgusted: / of love, not a trace; torment / of hunger filled every stomach."
If the apocalypse looms so large in our imaginations, it's because it inevitably attracts us. That's why we've created countless cultural productions based on catastrophic and collapsing scenarios. Deep down, we know that peace, order, and balance don't usually last, neither in the natural nor in the social sphere. And since we've been half-dodging "the great catastrophe" for some time now, we have the feeling that widespread collapse must arrive at any moment. We have no shortage of reasons to suffer (and things to fix): the ecological crisis, geopolitical instability, megalomaniacal leaders, the rise of extreme ideologies, the radical increase in technological power. Our social structure is increasingly complex, making the possible apocalyptic scenarios ever more diverse.
False alarm, however. For now, the apocalypse remains, above all, an idea. A cultural artifact.
