Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse, also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community. They think, I’ll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death. But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

With their plain and preppy look and their soft serious voices, these people were different from the West Coast eco-warriors with their piercings and their food-coloring hair dye, T-shirts whose logos were supposed to help define some micro-split in movement ideology. Nor did these boys resemble the anti-globalist window smashers of Genoa, the milieu in which Pascal had been radicalized, among people who wore all black. (Then again, Pascal didn’t look like that either.) But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics, or they cultivate, instead, a strait-laced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are (who they consider themselves to be). People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old-growth logging, or protest nuclear power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics, to its knees. But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric—the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present—is to shore up their own identity. It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities they present to the world as “themselves.” Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego, ...

All attempts to categorize people, Bruno said, whether by astrology or anthropology or blood, answer to a root desire: to know the future. And by knowing it, we hope that we might prepare for it, or even control it.