At the End of the World, the Ocean

I’ve been thinking about the ocean.

Not just because I’m at home in Vancouver now, though that’s definitely a part of it: I felt the pull of the ocean the other day, so I took the long way home on my bicycle. I wanted to hug the water as long as possible.  I needed to be close to it.  I felt the same thing again today – that yearning to be close to the sea.  I took the bus to Wreck Beach and danced in the sand and put my toes in the water.  It was cold, but it reminded me I was alive. 

I know I’m not the only person who feels this – my friend and fellow Chronicles of Word contributor Josh Martin and I were g-chatting about that feeling of being pulled to the sea.  Like the sea is truer compass for us than North.

But there’s another reason I’ve been thinking about the ocean.

Some of the most common writing advice (and by the way, it’s common, because it’s good) is that you should read a lot of books like the one you want to write.  So I’ve been devouring post-Apocalyptic books (especially, but not exclusively, YA) for the past year and a bit.  One thing that comes up over and over in these books about what happens after the end of the world is the ocean.  And when they talk about the ocean, it’s got a mythological, supernatural quality to it.  It’s much more than a place of natural beauty.

In Moira Young’s Blood Red Road, the characters speak of the Big Water – it’s a place where they plan to reunite, a place where they can build a new, better life.  A sort of Promised Land.  In Carrie Ryan’s Forest of Hands and Teeth, Mary dreams of journeying to the Ocean – a place nobody has ever seen, but that she remembers from her mother’s stories.  Nobody believes that the Ocean actually exists, but Mary’s faith in it borders on religious fervour.  It’s in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking – Mistress Coyle speaks with awe of her younger years by the sea, and the climax of the last book takes place by the ocean (with good symbolic reasoning).  And it’s in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – the man and the boy, at the end of everything, heading towards the ocean.  I could go on.  But that post-Apocalyptic novel nerd-fest could probably fill a small codex.

In any case, I wondered why.  Why at the end of the world, do all these characters yearn for the Ocean? What is it about the sea that makes it take on such a mythical quality, especially when there’s nothing else left?

The answer (or at least, the beginning of one) came to me via another YA novel – not a post-Apocalyptic one, but an excellent one all the same, David Levithan’s Every Day.  In Every Day, the ocean is a leitmotif for the human desire to reach out and touch the infinite, to connect to something bigger than ourselves.  There’s a beautiful passage where the main character, A (who by the way, has no fixed gender, since s/he wakes up in a different body every day) has just run off to the ocean with a girl named Rhiannon, and they both feel its awesome presence: “It feels like we’ve stepped out of time… The ocean makes its music; the wind does its dance.  We hold on.  At first we hold on to one another, but then it starts to feel like we are holding on to something even bigger than that.  Greater.” 

The ocean is something bigger than ourselves.  It’s wider than we can see, unfathomably deep.  It seems to go on forever.  There’s so much of it that’s unknown and unknowable.  Beautiful, powerful, unpredictable, transcendent.  If you think about the words that we use to describe the sea, they’re the same words human beings use to talk about the divine.  Human beings have been crafting myths, legends and religions since we became conscious, in an attempt to reach out and touch the Infinite.  You can call it whatever you want to call it: God, the Universe, Nature, the embodiment of good in the world, the force of life, that which connects all things.  But all these words mean the same thing: something bigger than ourselves.

But in these post-Apocalyptic landscapes, the divine doesn’t exist anymore.  It can’t exist. God is dead, and often, people have killed God (thanks Nietzche).  Belief is impossible, because once the worst has happened, what is there left to believe in? The destruction of the world is the ultimate proof that there is no higher power, and that even if there is a higher power, S/he has abandoned humanity.

So what’s left? How do human beings respond to the urge to reach out and touch the Infinite, in a world where God is dead?

Answer: the Ocean.

When there’s nothing left that means anything, it’s the one thing that still means something. 

These authors seem to say, at the end of the world, the people who survive will be the people who still feel the pull of the ocean.  Who still want to reach out and connect to the transcendent.  Maybe the Ocean won’t be what keeps them alive, but it’ll be what makes keeping alive worthwhile.