The Cabin at the End of the World

No matter how bleak or dire, end-of-the-world scenarios appeal to us because we take meaning from the end... there's also undeniable allure to witnessing the beginning of the end and perishing alone with everyone and everything else.

Too many people have smiles that don’t mean what a smile is supposed to mean. Their smiles are often cruel and mocking, like how a bully’s grin is the same as a fist.

Not all gifts are easy to accept. The most important gifts are often the ones we wish with all our hearts to refuse.

The cabin is now a haunted house, baptized by yesterday’s violence,

He’d irrationally hoped he could somehow put off indefinitely the future day on which she would recognize cruelty, ignorance, and injustice were the struts and pillars of the social order, as unavoidable and inevitable as the weather.

They share another long look. This one is reserved for ill-fated observers in the moments before impending, inescapable calamity, whether it be natural disaster or violent failure of humanity; a look of resigned melancholy and awe, unblinking in the face of a revealed, horrific, sacred truth. And they realize again, in this darkest hour of the darkest day, they remain alone, fundamentally alone.

Trust the process. Dumbly believe things are how they’re supposed to be and that they will work out simply because of that belief, even if you know better.

You know, I never realized the end of the world would be kept to such a tight, regimented TV Guide schedule.

He’ll be doomed to say sorry for eternity and no one will listen and no one will believe him.

Just because you have a scar doesn’t mean you have something wrong with you, Wen.

Her dads warned her that some people won't understand their family and might say ignorant (their word) and hurtful things to her and it might not be their fault because of what they've been taught by other ignorant people with too much hate in their hearts, and, yes, it was very sad. Wen assumed they were talking about the same bad or stranger-danger people that hide in the city and want to take her away, but the more they talked to her about what Scott had said and why others might say things like that, too, the more it seemed like they were talking about everyday kind of people. Weren't the three of them everyday kind of people? She pretended to understand for her dads' sake, but she didn't and still doesn't. Why do she and her family need to be understood or explained to anyone else?

An ever-evolving mental life is impossible to fully detail, even by the owner, and one generally goes from day to day unquestioning one’s own being or consciousness, with absolute faith in this is who I am and this is how I think.

Andrew is not good at mollifying, at saying what people want to hear. He excels at saying what he wants people to hear. That is not the same as telling-it-like-it-is, a folksy descriptor that is spin for being an entitled asshole.

Maybe the truth is the end has already been happening long before we arrived at the cabin and what we’re seeing, what we’ve been seeing, is not the fireworks of the world’s denouement but the final flickering sparks of our afterword.

I promise that I'm here to be your friend and I'm not going to be a stranger for long.

If Leonard again insists the four of them are regular, everyday people—as though everyday people have nothing but love in their hearts and are always reasonable and have never committed atrocities in the name of their self-proclaimed everydayness—Andrew is going to scream until he can’t scream anymore. He gets it; of course they are regular people. That message (there are regular people and there are others) is

He places the knife in the trunk next to the gun safe, leaving an offering for a bloodthirsty, violent god, were there any other kind.

what we’re seeing, what we’ve been seeing, is not the fireworks of the world’s denouement but the final flickering sparks of our afterword.

Her parents have tried to wean her off sleeping with lights on, explaining her still-growing brain needs the dark for proper rest. Wen once told them she doesn’t want her brain growing too fast for her head, anyway.

That’s the spirit. But listen, even the best dads in the world worry and nag and fuck up, and you have to give yourself permission to fuck up and allow Wen to mess up on her own, too. Accept that none of us will ever be perfect.

The cabin, even with the benefit of the morning’s wholesome sunlight, appears worn, tired, and bereft. The paint on the door and trim is dulled and sun bleached. The wooden shingles are blemished with dots of mildew and are loose and as asymmetrical as crooked teeth. The cabin is now a haunted house, baptized by yesterday’s violence, and its passive accumulation of similarly vicious and desperate acts is as inevitable as dust gathering on the windowsills.

I don't believe you and I wish you would stop making this all up.

Your god is a killer then.

Leonard falls off his knees and returns to all fours, a reversal of the evolutionary ascent-of-humans pictograph.

Continuing is neither brave nor cowardly, and it is both.

She makes a deal with this killer-god of Leonard’s, a god she doesn’t believe is real but is very much frightened of. She has this image of his god as all the black empty space between stars when you look up at the night sky, and this god of collected blankness is big enough to swallow the moon, the earth, the sun, the Milky Way, and big enough it couldn’t possibly care about anyone or anything.

God, I hated that saying and how often he’d say it. It made this big strong guy seem so mealymouthed, passive, weak, resigned to failure. Trust the process and a shrug. Might as well wear a shirt that reads FINE, I GIVE UP.