We Burned So Bright: Humanity at the end of the world
What would you do if the world was ending? Where would you go? Who would you end it with? Who would you become?
In a stunningly short 166 pages, TJ Klune writes to mirror the rapid end of the world. The book starts slow but swiftly picks up, resembling the fast pace at which the world, and those conceptualizing it, suddenly face the end.
Rodney and Don, husbands in their 70s, say goodbye to their lifetime home and hop into an RV, racing the end of the world to fulfill a vague promise that isn’t revealed until the end. Along the way, signs of the end start showing: cracks in the earth and cracks in humanity. Signs of light and dark.
They first come upon a family: a wife and husband in their 30s and two kids. This moment symbolizes all stages of life meeting face to face, revealing that it is much easier to accept the end of the world when you’re 72. How do you approach that conversation with kids who can’t understand the full implications? And the mother is pregnant! Conception vs. destruction. Beginnings vs. ends.
They come across hippies who get them high and encourage them to appreciate the last calm of the earth, feel the grass, skinny-dip in freezing cold water, have sex, and witness a marriage. Shortly after, they come upon a traffic stop in which people start ramming their cars into each other and killing one another in fits of rage. We go immediately from lovely hippies to wicked people killing each other on the street. Human nature is showing. The masks are slipping. People are panicking, and their true natures are showing.
A juxtaposition between moral and immoral, and what comes out when life is confirmed to end in a month, emerges as the prominent theme. Rodney and Don’s journey consists of more beautifully good and hauntingly bad mixed in, showing us how different people from all different backgrounds and lives react to such an impossible concept.
Don and Rodney, in their 70s, represent the end of life. Their physical journey across the country represents reliving all stages of life by meeting all kinds of people who are experiencing their own unique grief, love, and loss.
We Burned So Bright explores how humanity, the purest to the most corrupt, would react to the end of the world. Gravity dissipates. The moon is distorted. What is left when we have nothing but the privacy of our own pitch darkness? Only the comforting belief that for a short time, we did once burn so bright. With love and connection and joy and even pain and hardship. And aren’t we lucky to have experienced it at all?
