Reading report by Ms. Hanka de Haas-de Roos
As a result of a sudden climatic change the earth is at a great pace being covered with ice. The narrator, a writer, and his beloved are looking at the sunset, unique as always – the last one, but that they don’t know. All of a sudden the sun disappears behind thick black clouds and the earth is shrouded in darkness. The beloved vanishes into nothingness.
These were the last days of the world, slowly society comes to a standstill. The last trains, the last planes, the last ships depart, with unknown destiny, no one knows where north, south, east or west is, compasses don’t work anymore, the magnetic poles have ceased to exist, the rhythm of day and night has been replaced by darkness.
The collapse is total: authority, laws, rules, means of communication, it all doesn’t exist anymore. Hordes of people start migrating to where they think the south must be, in search of the sun. In their wake the ice moves up. Humanity is being thrown upon its own resources, the most basic instincts awaken, there is fighting and plundering in the search for food.
A secret authority, last remnant of an organized society, saves the protagonist from death – which he had sought himself – and orders him to go in search of a scholar who, by complicated calculations (the power of numbers), had predicted this ice-age, but to whom nobody would listen. He is being given no clue for his search, no directions, only a little photograph of the man, in his youth, and a concise biography. This man is the only person on earth who might be able to turn back the clock. As likewise a writer, not being led by
mathematics, but by his senses, might be the only person who could accomplish an impossible task like this one.
The writer is being swept along in a southward stream of human beings. After many wanderings and adventures of an apocalyptic nature he finds himself at the end of the world. There, in the ruïns of a village, many people are waiting for a ship with black sails that navigates the expanses of ice, to be taken across to a utopian town that, as rumours go, should be beyond. In the village the writer meets a young woman who claims to be the scholar’s fiancée, and tells him that he disappeared on his way to a climate conference, leaving her behind, for inexplicable reasons. She presumes he might be found in the utopian society.
The ship does appear and after a terrible journey, during which many die or simply disappear, the survivors land on the ‘shore’ beyond. The crossing reminds one of the crossing of the Styx, the boatsman of Charon.
A ‘welcome party’ takes the newly arrived to an underground nation, which in its idea resembles Plato’s utopia: all are equal, all work, all are being rewarded in the same way, with something that is supposed to be food. But as we all know, utopia does not exist, and like everywhere else in the world, here as well counter forces develop, and fights brake out. The Whites believe in their ideal state and are quite prepared to spend the rest of their days underground in darkness. The Reds, on the contrary, want to return to the upperworld, to the sun, to the world of olden times, the familiar parameters.
There are rumours that the scholar is to be found somewhere in that underground society, on the side of the Reds. With a guide
the writer sets out and he finds the man – only his head, on a pedestal, talking about his prophecies and his warnings. But there is nothing he can do anymore. ‘You’ve found what you were looking for, so now go,’ says the head to the writer. And he goes and enlists as kamikaze to fly one of the enormous balloons that, with a gigantic bomb explosion (9-11?) in the atmosphere, should restore the earth to its original climatological and geographical state. The writer, however, has other ideas. He flies, higher and higher, away from the other balloons, in search of his friend, Icarus, who during their crossing disappeared on wings into the universe. And he will fly until in the end he is free, not bound anymore by anything, not even by the thoughts of his beloved, whom he didn’t find back, but neither searched for – he’ll fly away, far from the world, and up to the sun. It is the end of his search for the scholar, but, more important, also the end of his search for himself – a catharsis, you might call it, a ‘crossing’ of the soul.
All in all an interesting theme in its elucidation of man as a creature that is being guided by technology and consumer society, and in the process forgets the essence of life, and the strength of imagination, of myth. The theme is being developed in captivating images, mythical ones, sometimes biblical, with reference to the diverse states of humanity, the relapse into primitiveness, life as hunter-gatherer, the strife that arises in utopia, the search for the essence of being.
