World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After
Martha Park
Hub City Press
ISBN: 979-8-88574-048-7
In World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, Memphis-based Martha Park takes on the existential questions of not one world but of several worlds in transition.
Using tenderness and humor, and by posing questions, Park’s essays probe what it means to be a parent and a daughter during a pandemic in a time of climate change. She searches for spiritual connection. But maybe, most importantly, she plumbs how to be authentically human and how to find hope in our current epoch.
The throughline of Park’s collection is evident at the very beginning. Her father is retiring from his life-long role as a Methodist pastor. Because her father is synonymous with religion for her, his retirement changes her relationship with the church, and perhaps even with her higher power. The opening conveys a sense of loss. Park doesn’t remain in that loss for very long, however. She has work to do.
While many of her essays are metaphysical, Park believes in action, saying, “Instead, the work itself was its own remedy against despair, against assuming all was already lost.” In that statement she makes a case against nostalgia for the world that was, and for bravely facing the world in front of us.
Visits to graveyards where the dead are placed directly into the earth ground us in the conversation of what our bodies mean both spiritually and ecologically. In speaking with conservationists beneath the branches of the endangered Florida Torreya tree, the author considers what saving a species means. And when she stops at the Ark Encounter, a theme park that is a fundamentalist interpretation of Noah’s Ark, the animatronic praying Noah elicits a raised eyebrow and a chuckle. Here, Park notes that “fire and brimstone” seem to be surging at a time when we are encountering apocalyptic flooding and rising sea levels.
Still, she maintains a white-knuckle grip on hope: “Maybe whatever we imagine will be ‘unveiled’ in the apocalypse depends on what kind of world we imagine lurks just beneath the surface of the everyday… I have always hoped that any unveiled world might reveal a hidden wholeness.” This unveiling, this transition, is what Park lovingly unfolds throughout the remainder of her essays.
In an essay about her pregnancy experience during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, she processes the distance she experiences from her community and from her own body. It is the quick check-ins from neighbors, and even her sleepy hound, that reconnect her to a larger world. In another she describes watching doomsday prepping reality shows, connecting that kind of hoarding behavior to white supremacy and recognizing mutual aid as the flip side of the coin. And in another she visits a great-aunt in assisted living. Her aunt seems to have one foot in the grave, her mind vacillating between the past and the present, her speech full of non sequiturs. A truth is revealed to Park: “The veils fall away, the walls she’s built up collapse; she can be her many selves, all at once.”
None of this is linear. Across each of these vulnerable essays, Park offers no definitive path forward. What each essay points to is unending change. Through a religious lens, she adapts the idea of Resurrection — a resurrection not of what was but of something altered.
Her final essay is the story of her child’s birth. Its short entries show the disjointedness and pain she experienced. Everything on her path through was unexpected. As she learns that the medication she was given would affect her memory of the birth, as she struggles to piece together what happened and what went wrong, she searches for what meaning can be made from the pieces she does have, how to make herself anew.
This is where she leaves us to chart our own way forward in the current state of the world. She wants us to consider how to tell the story of the broken events around us, and the associated suffering, so that our experience has new meaning.
This book is needed. Instead of sharing hard-and-fast edicts, the kind desired by those with a fundamentalist frame of mind, Park advocates for courage and conversation. When we, too, ask questions about life, death, parenting, the climate, God, and how to be a good human, she is generous enough to tell us a hard truth: there are no answers. But knowing, and even understanding, isn’t the goal. The task, according to Park, is not to shrink away from this difficult time, but to engage with it, to do something to make it better, and to continue… without end.
Toby LeBlanc currently lives in Austin, TX. His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, Deep South Magazine, The Writing District, and Coffin Bell Journal. His novel, Dark Roux (Unsolicited Press, 2022), is set in South Louisiana, the place of his birth.
