Which is probably why I’d never heard of it. It’s hard going, especially at first, and though the book is not long, there are not many characters, and the few events take place over about three weeks’ time, it’s taken me about two weeks to finish it. Will Self later wrote a novel called The Book of Dave, also many years post-apocalypse, written in a dialect developed from a depressed London cabbie, and I haven’t managed to finish it yet (though I will). The religion in the book is based on the cabbie’s journal, a brilliant idea. Years before I heard of this book, I thought of writing a post-apocalyptic story in which various groups of survivors have each managed to hold onto or find one book from one section of a bookstore: the diet section. One group, the Atkinsians, are at war with the people on the other side of the hill, who follow the Law of the South Beach. That’s about as far as I got. If anyone reading this would like to write that story, please do; I’d love to read it.

Anyway. The story of Riddley Walker follows a young man, living in a sort of Iron Age Kent, as he puzzles out the meaning of the local religion. This is based on chemistry and physics as well as on the only surviving fragment of pre-disaster writing, a short piece on the legend of Saint Eustace, a medieval painting in Canterbury Cathedral. The Saint Eustace, or Eusa people –

Let me interject here. The made-up dialect is rich in rewards for those inclined to play with language. For example, Eusa could be just a rendering of Eustace, or it could stand for USA, where nuclear weapons were first developed, or it could be a bastardization of Jesus, or it could mean used to, or a number of other interpretations. This is part of what makes the book slow reading.

The Eusa people seem to be feeling their way back to an understanding of nuclear fission, while the secretive dyers and charcoal burners have passed down a recipe in song for making gunpowder. And the whole thing revolves around puppet shows, including Punch and Judy.

It’s mind-bending, but it’s what I call a true story, meaning it’s made up (obviously) but what it’s talking about is fundamental Truth. In the end, it’s a meditation on our place in the universe, and on power and human nature. It’s very similar in that theme to A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr. (1960). As one of the characters says to Riddley Walker,

“Riddley you know as wel as I do if you put 1 figger on your right han and a nother on your lef the 1 wil go agenst the other some how some time.”

Give a man a stick, he’ll whack another man with it. If he finds a rock, he’ll use that. Human society will always be driven to create bigger and better ways to kill each other. War is in our nature. But is it our nature? Individuals can transcend it, but can we do it as a species?

Remains to be seen. For some reason I’m faintly optimistic, or I suppose I wouldn’t have become a Buddhist. And like all frustrated idealists, I’m cynical as well.

The same character says, shortly before making the above point, “Riddley do you think theres hoap of any thing?” And Riddley replies, “Theres new earf on the barrens all the time.” He’s referring to the soil and growing things slowly, very slowly, encroaching on the blasted plain that surrounds the nuked Canterbury.

Or maybe he’s referring to the slow changes that can transform mankind.

They’re depressed because they’ve seen a world that is beautiful, in which every living thing is connected and in harmony, and they’ve been reminded how far they are from living that way.

I went to avatar-forums.com and had a look at the discussion there for myself. And you know what?

I like those people. They’re sweet, and they give me hope. Most of them have realized why they’re sad, why they’re going to see this movie over and over, and it’s not because it’s a beautiful dream. It’s because we have that reality right here on Earth, and we’re fucking it up.

We do live in a beautiful world in which everything is connected. Unfortunately, much of it has been thrown way out of balance by greed. In the film, the Na’vi fight off corporate mining interests with the help of the main character, but our own planet lost that fight a long time ago. If you haven’t noticed lately how much that sucks, it’s because you’re purposefully repressing it. Probably because it’s too depressing to think about.

If you’re suffering from post-Avatar depression, here are some things you can do:

• Get informed. Learn as much as you can about ecology, climate change, water resources, and even chemistry and physics if you can do it. Talk to people about it.
• Vote for ecologically sustainable practices, and vote against unsustainable practices. Act locally – pay attention to what’s going on in your community, and speak up. Call or write to your government representatives.
• Buy local food and products whenever possible. Do what you can in your own life to reduce your energy consumption.
• If you can, consider getting an energy audit for your home, and even installing solar panels or a wind turbine.
• Be kind. Live more simply. Continue to question your values.

“All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”
- Jake Sully in Avatar

This isn’t about just installing curly lightbulbs and figuring we’ve saved the world. Part of the problem is the lack of ideas, or more accurately, the lack of people talking about the ideas. Look around for more, and come up with some of your own.

We are part of our environment. This isn’t my opinion, it isn’t some hippy-dippy bullshit, it’s reality. If you think it’s not true, please, try living in a vacuum. Be my guest.

Living as if we aren’t part of our environment means that we’re making it so – we’re exiling ourselves right out of existence. Either we do something about it, or we wait to die. And as much as you might hate the sound of it, “doing something about it” means realizing that we are our environment, we are all connected, and the way we live now does not work. Our one hope is to balance the earth in an equation that includes us and everything else.

And that we learn to do this before we get off the planet, and go ruin the rest of the universe.

Writers of articles on post-Avatar depression, and of course most of the comment-section peanut gallery, sneer at these people. It’s a movie, they say. It’s not real. Get over it.

I think it’s the cynics and sneerers that have something they need to get over. They’re so far removed from reality, they can’t even feel what’s missing.

So S. and I go into the cinema to see if there was anything else playing – the smell of popcorn was that tantalizing – but there’s nothing at the right time, and I’m ready to leave. S. eyes the staircase. “Let’s just go up here for a minute,” she says.

I’d never been to this theater before, but she’d been here lots of times, born and raised in the city. At the top of the stairs is a ticket-taker, so I hesitate. Nearby is another cinema worker, chatting on the phone. “Bathroom?” S. says, and the woman gestures. We walk right in.

Who knew you could do that?

I’m giddy, having snuck into the movies – I feel like a little kid as we’re walking down the main drag, past the popcorn concessions (gotta get some), past theater after theater. I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to see. S. is just heading for the bathroom – she really did have to go.

And suddenly we’re in the doorway of a movie, I can’t tell which one, but I have my suspicions as there are security guards and a guy waving a wand-style metal detector. S. is walking so purposefully, he assumes she belongs there. “You were here before, right?” he says, and waves her in. I ride her wake, trying not to screech with joy.

We’re in. And The Book of Eli is just starting.

We had to stand, but it’s just under 2 hours and we both work on our feet all day at the bookstore, so no sweat (my feet are much better these days).

Later she told me how she and a friend happened to walk past a theater downtown showing a premier of some big movie, and all the stars were there. She and her friend just walked right in. Saw the movie, saw the stars.

New York!

This is all you need to see.

The only reason anyone would go to see a movie like this is for the special effects. Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow – we all know the plot will suck and the science will be dodgy at best, but who cares, right? Let’s blow some shit up!

That’s why 2012, from the same director, is such an enormous disappointment. I could have forgiven their nonsensical explanation for the end of the world – neutrinos from solar flare activity somehow microwave the earth and boil the core – if only they’d given me more of what I paid for: disaster porn.

We do get to see Los Angeles break in half and slide into the ocean, a sight I can never get enough of. The lumps of burning magma from the Yellowstone supervolcano were very well done, I thought, as was the hemisphere-enveloping ash cloud. And I did enjoy watching a battleship named the USS John F. Kennedy slam into the White House, and St. Peter’s Basilica roll over a dense crowd of worshipers.

I can even tolerate one more Eiffel Tower breaking in half, Christ the Redeemer falling off the hill in Rio de Janeiro, and – just barely – the Sistine Chapel ceiling splitting open, the crack running, predictably, right between the almost-touching fingers of God and Adam, a visual so trite that it’s an eye-rolling cliché the instant you see it.

But I cannot forgive having spent over two thirds of a three hour movie watching the actors wince their way through a weak, cringe-inducing story even by disaster film standards. The characters and their conflicts are so shallow, I don’t even want to spend time detailing them here, but the climax of the movie consists of John Cusack’s character getting his family on board a multi-government sponsored ark built atop a mountain in the Himalayas (presumably to appeal to a Chinese audience). Do you want to see a movie about John Cusack trying to get on an ark?

The spectacularly bad writing makes it impossible to overlook the movie’s faults, a problem I had to a lesser extent with Independence Day. No amount of special effects can make up for a writer and director with so little respect for the intelligence of their audience. However much money they’ll make off of fools like me who’ll see a movie like this (at a matinee price) just for the effects, they could have made so much more, and won over a legion of fans, if they’d spent a little bit of time coming up with a decent story and characters with a little depth. I realize that actual insight is beyond their abilities.

To their credit, they hardly mention the Mayan calendar at all, and mostly steer away from any religious or New Age prophecy, though it couldn’t have made the movie any worse. My friend and I agreed that the animals gave far and away the best performances. One has to assume it’s because the animals were not subject to the script or to the director’s instructions. I particularly admired the chicken’s comic timing. But not enough to justify the $6 and three hours I wasted on this trash.

Watch the trailer on YouTube and save your time and money; this isn’t worth seeing on any screen.

If you, like 10 billion other people on the planet, read The Da Vinci Code, you won’t be surprised to learn that his latest book, six years in the making, is every bit as awful – and yet captivating. A friend of mine pointed out that one of the secrets to Dan Brown’s success as a writer is that he makes stupid people feel smart, by telling them all this great stuff; and he makes smart people feel smart, because they get to pick apart his writing, his factual errors, and his lack of originality. Everybody wins.

My friend’s favorite example in The Lost Symbol is a character who is killed early on, and is completely forgotten by the end of the book. That character was forced to give up her access code to the villain, a four-digit code that, she reveals, is actually… her birthday.

Now, she’s working – for the elegant and brilliant love interest – on a top-secret research project in a top-secret location, having signed reams of nondisclosure agreements, yet she was permitted to create a pass code from her birthday? She’s supposed to be a computer genius. The plot doesn’t hinge on this pass code, but that’s the kind of thing that drives me wild, even more than the overuse of italics. I gave up early on Angels and Demons because – okay, so they had this incredibly dangerous substance, perhaps the most dangerous substance in the universe. And it had basically one layer of security on it, once a person was inside the CERN campus – a retinal scan. Not even a frickin’ password. And the villain, naturally, rips out the eyeball of the idiot scientist (who hadn’t even put a padlock on the door) and uses that to gain entry, even though a retinal scan will not work with a dead eyeball. I had already been irritated by numerous other things in the opening chapters, but at that point I threw the book across the room.

I originally stopped reading The Lost Symbol, too, at an early chapter that opens with a man tattooing his own scalp. Immediately I was thrown out of the narrative flow (such as it was). How was he accomplishing this? Was he using mirrors? Doing it blind? And what exactly was he inking in? We are told that his entire body is tattooed, except for a circle at the top of his head. Was he now filling in this circle? Darkening some color that had faded? What the hell was he doing?

I was tempted to throw the book across the room then, but somehow soldiered on. Bad writing, factual errors, plot holes, flat and puppetlike characters who are supposed to be of genius-level intelligence unless the action requires them to be incredibly stupid – these are the hallmarks of a Dan Brown novel, just as much as the secret societies, the “symbology,” and the brushes with mysticism.

So, don’t expect great literature, but I’m happy to say that, if you liked The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol is definitely more of what you like. It’s a fast read and contains some interesting, supposedly accurate information about the Masons, about whom I always feel that I ought to be more interested than I am. What kept me reading were the ideas Brown merely tantalized us with, one being the core of the message his hapless hero is attempting to decode – that the most ancient texts of human civilization describe the same phenomena as modern physics. The other is the subject of the love interest’s research, the science, or “science” if you like, of Noetics, or the “potentials and powers of consciousness” as defined by the Noetic Institute.

I despise New Age, especially the whole “Power of Intention” movement. New Agers seem to me to be mostly white, middle- and upper middle-class people who want to believe that quantum physics means that the universe is nothing more than an infinite Santa Claus, just waiting to shower them with fabulous gifts – all they have to do is give themselves permission to be greedy, and think the right thoughts. Thinking the wrong thoughts is what draws the bad stuff to you, every time. This is preached most egregiously in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, in which she tells us that everything that happens in your life, happens because of your thoughts. This includes accidents, cancer, natural disasters, and even… genocide. Yep – those people in Rwanda? They brought it on themselves, with their bad thoughts. The Holocaust? Same thing.

This is a nice, comfortable opinion to have, if nothing very bad has ever happened to you. It’s really pleasant to think that one deserves all of one’s good fortune, that it’s not because of random accidents of birth and chance. It’s pleasant to think that all the bad stuff that happens to other people, happened to them because they somehow earned it – whether it’s because they’re sinners in the Christian sense, or sinners in the New Age sense, by having the wrong intentions. It’s pleasant, but it’s bullshit. Here’s an article on Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book on the subject, Bright-Sided, in which she links all this power-of-intention crap to the recent financial crisis.

I don’t believe there’s absolutely nothing to all of this intention stuff, but for sure it’s not as simple as the Rhonda Byrneses of the world would have you believe. I read Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, mentioned in The Lost Symbol, and was fascinated by her accounts of conventional scientists bravely following their research as it led them deeper into strange realms, of telekinesis and remote healing – until I went online and started checking up on her facts. Of course these studies and these scientists are controversial. It seems to me that there are roughly as many adherents of what we’ll call Noetics as there are opponents of it, with most people not knowing much and not caring one way or the other. People like James Randi make a living debunking psychics and faith healers, scorning them for making money off the gullible, but Randi is every bit as invested, emotionally and financially, in protecting his personal myth as Lynne McTaggart or Rhonda Byrne.

A myth is, of course, a story we use to explain reality to ourselves. In Out of Your Mind, Alan Watts describes the two major myths of western civilization. In the west, most believe that the universe was created either by God (the ceramic myth), or by the blind forces of nature (the fully automatic myth). That the rationalistic, scientific explanation of the universe is also a myth might be hard to accept, if that’s the one you grew up believing. But of course it is, and those who believe the universe was absolutely created by God feel the same way about their myth. Science, for the vast majority of us, involves nearly the same kind of faith as religion does. If you doubt this, let me ask you: how many hadron super colliders have you experimented with lately? How much can you understand of the math used by physicists to explain their conclusions? I trust peer-reviewed studies and the scientific method, replicable results, and so on, but in order to do so, I have to trust the people who are telling me that these methods work, and that these are their results. And I know that, however unimaginably good someone is at math, s/he’s still a person, with all the same faults and foibles as everybody else.

The scientific community is extremely resistant to change, and yet, huge changes happen on a fairly regular basis. They’re now exploring quantum activity in biological processes. Who knows what’s next?

Do I want to believe in telekinesis and remote healing? Sure. I also want there to be fairies and hobbits and secret doors to other worlds, but that doesn’t mean I believe that’s how the universe works. I’m agnostic on the powers of the mind, but I’m also extremely curious. I want to know what my mind can do. I’ve had some experiences with lucid dreaming, from practicing meditation, and from using the methods of NLP. I want to take it further. Weirdly, The Lost Symbol has inspired me.

And this is what’s really cool about Dan Brown. Many of us have a sense that there’s more to life than what it appears to be, more than just blind forces, and yet we’re not satisfied by conventional religion, either. Dan Brown’s world hints at mysterious connections, deeper meanings, and secret knowledge. Who else blends mysticism so perfectly with skepticism?

But he’s still a crappy writer. Here are my favorite Dan Brown mockery sites:

• If you can’t bring yourself to read the book, here’s a hilarious summary
• Another fun, hour-by-hour reading
• Slate’s Da Vinci Code sequel generator (pretty accurate)
• 50 factual errors in The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol

The basic plot is that the countries of the northern hemisphere have engaged in all-out nuclear war, a war lasting about a month. Between the nuclear blasts and subsequent radiation sickness, everyone in Russia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America are dead. The story takes place in Australia, where the eerily calm survivors – there were no bombs for them – are waiting as the radiation creeps southward. Our heroes are an American submarine commander, stranded by the war in southern waters, his Australian liaison, the liaison’s wife, and a female friend of theirs who befriends the submarine commander. We wait and watch with them until the end. (Spoilers ahead.)

I think I should have read it twenty years ago. Back then, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, before the rise of terrorism world-wide, with the memory of the cold war still fresh in my mind, this story might have been more compelling, at least compelling enough to override the faults of the writing. As it was, well… it wasn’t terrible. I finished it, in fact I read the entire second half in one go, mostly so I could find out if there was some gruesome or amazing ending that would make this book as brilliant as I had been assured it was.

No such luck. Shute’s not a lyrical writer, for one thing. His central characters are decently sketched, but no more than that, and secondary characters are stick figures. And, he’s a man of his times. His times being 1957 (the book purports to take place in 1963), this means women are secretaries or mothers, there are no black or Asian people (in Australia?), and everybody smokes, so if that kind of thing irritates you, you are warned. He’s also rather old-womanish about sex, sickness, and death, which to my 21st century eyes was odd in a book about the end of the world. This fussiness might explain his charming fantasy that, with the entire country given three months to live, most people would simply carry on with what they had been doing before.

I suppose a lot of people would, if they could, once past the initial shock. The young couple, the liaison and his wife, plan their garden right up until the end, which is rather sweet. A doctor removes a tumor from a woman, giving her “a few more years.” The submarine commander maintains Navy discipline.

Most people continue going to work, so that, conveniently, the electricity, phones, public transit, and “food supplies” are uninterrupted, until everyone starts to get sick. I wondered if Shute genuinely believed that would happen, or if he simply didn’t have any idea how everything fits together in a modern country, and how it would break down, for example, once there was no more gas. That’s a shame, because one thing I love about apocalyptic novels is seeing how the author imagines it all coming apart. I would also imagine that billionaires would still be trying to make money right up to the end. There would be crime, looting, riots, and general panic. Someone would surely be trying to evacuate, or find a cure for radiation sickness, or praying for rescue from God or aliens. What would be happening over in South Africa, with apartheid? That civilization would collapse seems to me to be self-evident, though I could believe that small pockets could still exist, of people simply carrying on. But in a city the size of Melbourne? In every city everywhere, all the people would just lie quietly down in bed to die?

The 1950s were an innocent time, in many ways.

I felt like Shute was trying to shock his readers by making us think of the possibility of the world ending in three months’ time, or by showing us how callous people might be about death, toward the end, or by making every one of his characters commit suicide. I grew up in a very different world from him. None of that was the least bit disturbing to me. His whole apocalypse was really rather tame. I don’t believe that everyone would accept the news in the same way, and it made for a less interesting story.

I might watch the movie, just for the character of Moira, and her interactions with Dwight, the submarine commander. Played by Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, that should be fun. But I’m in no rush.

The strongest thing about the novel is the anti-nuclear war message, which was apparently controversial in 1957. But I absorbed the anti-nuke message in puberty. Maybe it was there in part because of this book, in which case, I tip my hat to it.

As to wondering what I would do with three months to live – been there, done that. I’ve been imagining the end of the world since I was a kid.