An "Age of Miracles"

I just finished reading one of those “could hardly put it down” type books: Karen Thompson Walker's exquisite “Age of Miracles”.

It has a fascinating premise: the world is gradually but steadily slowing. Days and nights grow ever longer - by mere minutes at first, but they’re up to sixty hours each by the time the story ends some twelve years later. Of course there are all kinds of inevitable side-effects because of this - everything from food to fuel shortages. Birds tumble from the sky; whales beach themselves en masse. Tides shift; lawns wither and die - as do virtually all plants and trees. Yet in the midst of all the natural changes, life more or less goes on and the narrator, eleven-year old Julia continues the challenging, sometimes painful process of growing up.

So besides being a very decent coming-of-age story, the book also raises big issues that are hard to stop thinking about. How would I deal with a slowing? Would I be a real-timer, trying desperately to continue to follow the sun’s rise and set, hoping my body will adapt? Or would I be a clock-timer, sticking rigidly to the twenty-four hour cycle even if it did frequently mean rising in the pitch dark and going to bed in broad daylight?

There is no ideal solution, of course. Either one would be a huge challenge for a person who can't even adjust with ease to the routine change of time every fall. In the end, though, I suppose I'd opt for clock time; it just seems it would give a greater sense of normalcy and badly needed structure to life. And in the book, that's the government mandated option that the majority do adopt.

The other major thing I ponder is how many small things we take completely for granted, yet would miss terribly. When Walker writes something like “it was the last banana (or grape or pineapple) I would ever taste” I just found it so intensely painful; heartbreaking, really. No birdsong. No wind in the trees because there are no trees. No smell of fresh grass. No flowers.

How many tiny pleasures we have to cherish. How little we appreciate them. How much we'd ache for them if they were to leave forever. How much we would miss the sun’s warmth on our cheeks. (A year or so into the slowing, the sun’s rays are growing so intense you can no longer safely go out in the sun. It can burn right through clothing. People clad their homes with radiation shields, build underground shelters, and essentially live their lives in darkness.) And how much more might we appreciate the miracle of sunrises and sunsets if we only got to see them every five days.

Despite what is obviously a somber topic, I didn't find the book totally negative or depressing. I certainly wouldn't want to live through a similar situation, but I had to admire the ones who did. Although there were some people who fled to alternative, real-time communities or religious communities, as well as the inevitable suicide cults, the majority continued to live more or less as normally as possible. (The book does hint that the situation was considerably more dire in places like Asia and Africa but doesn't get into details.)

Some did suffer - even die - from a mysterious “syndrome”, but most continued to go to work or school; to fall in love, marry and even have children. Scientists continued to work on solutions to meet food and energy needs. World War III didn't break out. There wasn't massive civil chaos. Humans really are incredibly adaptable creatures with an indomitable spirit and will to survive. Julia, in fact, is planning to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a doctor by the book's end (a flash forward to when she is 23).

The world has shrunk in many ways - no more Internet, for one example - yet life goes on, will always go on if humans have any possible way to keep it so. Because, underneath everything, we want to exist, to have made our mark, however small, on the universe. As a young Julia and her first boyfriend, Seth, etch into a freshly cast sidewalk, “We were here”. And that, in itself, is a small one of many in an age of miracles.