I think it places as the second best of everything I read this year. Here are some words to help me process how this book made me feel with almost no spoilers except general plot points here and there:
How do you face the end of everything, of this world, of your world ?
Do you shrink into yourself, concerned only with you and what is yours, shrink your love and care. Or do you let your love expand, giving yourself totally to life, giving up yourself period to what is bigger than your small, tight, selfish ego.
It is through that self sacrifice in love that you transcend your loss and your wounds. This I think is the thesis of this novel, expressed so succinctly, so symbolically and so profoundly.
Yet such a state of grace is a very hard ideal to reach. Striving for it, only a few of us will attain it. The key is suffering. Suffering and loss is the price to pay for enlightenment, empathy, and becoming fully human. Going in the opposite direction, closing in on ourselves only diminishes us and we become something less. Herein lies the tragedy of the human condition.
It is difficult because nature, nature being the natural world, our animal nature, our oppressive societal structures, incessantly keeps nipping at our heels, overwhelming us with strife, needs and distractions so that we tend to forget our calling, instead live small fearful lives chasing ever elusive and illusory safety.
See, in this semiconscious state we are in, dreaming our days away following the rituals programmed into us: we keep at it with our sacrosanct jobs, cars, picket fences and modern luxuries. In our sheer inertia we are ever consuming, clamoring for a secure spot in the socio-financial hierarchy of our manufactured world. Ever terrified of slipping behind, of falling through the cracks.
We have no time or space for the homeless or their suffering as we drive back and forth, no attention to the meek and broken, not if it loses us our ranking in the race. We need to keep running and not think much of those fallen on the side. Our very mode of material existence involves pumping immense quantities of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, boiling the planet with all its creatures and guaranteeing our extinction.
But we see this as almost abstract and distant, our lives are very short anyway, so we think this will not affect us at this moment. Doing right risks our short term “Jobs” , “Security” and “Life style”. We are too selfish or afraid to rock the boat. We HAVE to club the seals and harpoon the whales to feed the mouths at the table , right now, we have to.
Each of us is trying to barely survive (unless you are a 1%er) in a World that doesn’t care about us and keeps trying to break us apart. We feel so small and tired and helpless, just to hold on to the piece of life we managed to collect so far , weary of it slipping away.
That is the trap. The Christ figures among us awaken to that trap and blaze a path of self negation that shines a light in this darkness, that shows the way ahead. Let us try to be like them, as much as we can. That is our redemption, even though we still die anyway.
There is nothing truer than good fiction. This novel is a testament to something so true, so universal, it condenses our collective life within the confines of a small island bordering Antarctica, familial and romantic love, exploitative psychopathy and blind cruelty of unspeakable magnitude, which haunts the present with it’s ghosts. This is an evocative and haunting exposition of where we might be heading in the near future, unless we steer the course before it’s too late.
To all those who read this book or who plan to read it, I love you all, as I love myself. Hope it unclogs something in your soul as it did for mine. If you felt the same share the love ! Interested in other's perspectives always.
My favourite paragraph from the book:
“But there were eucalypts, three of them. My favorite trees on the land. They were a fraction too close to the house, but I couldn’t cut them down for that. I loved them too much. In the end everything burned for those eucalypts.”
by HilbertInnerSpace