Notes toward an essay, currently in the research and incubation stage:

• On the very idea of a “dark age.” Term coined by Petrarch, then mainstreamed by Gibbon.

• Popularity of the idea of a “new dark age” at turn of current millennium. Jane Jacobs’s final book, Dark Age Ahead (2004). Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture (2000). René Guénon’s insistence from a perennialist/traditionalist perspective that the whole modern age is a dark age of spiritual alienation.

• Globalization of the collapse sense here in the third decade of the twenty-first century CE. People on all sides and around the world now think collapse is happening. Berman’s critique is focused on America and framed from a progressive perspective, but conservatives, too, and people everywhere, are now convinced everything is imploding. Everyone just has a different set of reasons, a different narrative about why—and a different suggested response.

• The monastic option: preserve and transmit cultural memory.

• Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization: “A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained. It is not a world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned. It is not a world for which the grammaticus schedules regular classes of young scholars and knowledge is dutifully transmitted year by placid year” (35).

• Richard Heinberg in 2009 on the awesome duty of librarians in our age of evanescent digital media, whose long-term knowledge-preserving capacity is far less secure than we commonly think.

• John David Ebert in The New Media Invasion (2009) on self-luminous media and the rush to dematerialize culture into digital ghosts in an electronic age.

• The question of what to preserve and transmit—if anything. What’s worth trying to float down the river of time to a people and a world we’ll never see?

• George Romero in Day of the Dead (1985) recommending, via the voice of John, not to preserve or remember the current corrupt order after the apocalyse. John’s comments on the vast records of modern civilization housed in the underground nuclear bunker where the last humans have holed up while the scientists among them study the zombies in an attempt to reverse their condition:

“Hey, you know what they keep down here in this cave? Man, they got the books and the records of the top 100 companies. They got the Defense Department budget down here. And they got the negatives for all your favorite movies. They got microfilm with tax return and newspaper stories. They got immigration records, census reports, and they got the accounts of all the wars and plane crashes and volcano eruptions and earthquakes and fires and floods and all the other disasters that interrupted the flow of things in the good ole U.S. of A. Now, what does it matter, Sarah darling? All this filing and record keeping? Who ever gonna give a shit? Who even gonna get a chance to see it all? This is a great, big, fourteen-mile tombstone, with an epitaph on it that nobody gonna bother to read. Now, here you come, here you come with a whole new set of charts and graphs and records. What you gonna do? Bury them down here with all the other relics of what once was? [Sarah protests that what she and the scientists are doing is all that’s left to do.] Shame on you. There’s plenty to do, plenty to do, so long as there’s you and me and maybe some other people. We could start over, start fresh, get some babies. And teach them, Sarah. Teach them never to come down here and dig these records out.”

• The winnowing aspect of monastic cultural preservation. Just indiscriminately toss it all in the vault in the hope that something worthwhile sticks? Or use discernment to preserve and transmit only what seems worth transmitting as worthy seeds for a new future order that’s necessarily and permanently invisible to us beyond the collapse horizon?