sort of sustainable management of the earth’s resources that might save us if enacted in time. Given the urgency of their warning, their proposals felt quite modest, perhaps not entirely adequate to the task: “prioritizing” the establishment of vast reserves to restore forests and native plants, “rewilding” swathes of the planet, “promoting” a shift to a largely plant-based diet, reducing human fertility by ensuring access to birth control, “massively adopting” renewable energy sources while cutting back subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, “revising” the global economy in order “to reduce wealth inequality,” etc. With one exception—“increasing outdoor nature education for children, as well as the overall engagement of society in the appreciation of nature”—every single one of their suggestions was, in the pragmatic terms that politicians favor, inconceivable. Given budgetary restrictions on nonmilitary expenditures, even that latter prescription would be a hard sell.
Until the Rhino* upended everything, we had grown accustomed to politicians telling us that we must be practical and modest, that we should not expect too much. (Don’t make noise on the road to Xibalba.) Barack Obama’s favorite line: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” No matter that the good slipped off along the way and was replaced by the shitty a long time since, this was the mantra of ruling bureaucracies around the world for decades: that a rational politics can provide only incremental change; that any attempt to ask for more would be divisive and ultimately disastrous; that we should not fret because, to borrow Obama’s other favorite line, which he borrowed from Martin Luther King, the arc of history bends toward justice. We could have faith in progress if no other god. Time has a shape and a direction. We might not be able to see the arc in its entirety, and we should not be so bold and foolish as to hurry it along, to demand justice, or much of anything, but we should know, and be comforted, that however it might seem, step by step, compromise by compromise, things are getting better.
So the dogma goes. Or so it went. But those compromises, that refusal to make any demands that might upset the system—and irritate the Lords who profit from it—led us to this precipice, and the cold winds spiraling up from Xibalba. Decades of scrupulous and unrelenting pragmatism carried us here. The minimum necessary for survival now counts as madness. The courses of action still deemed practical will usher us straight down the path that leads to our own deaths.
The owls flew away. They didn’t fly straight but swooped in long arcs, hidden by the dusk, suggesting new paths and retracing old ones all at once. Pragmatism reeks. I want out. A way out that is first of all a way in.
In the end, Hunahpu and Xbalanque overcame the Lords of Xibalba by repeatedly faking their own deaths. Or, better put, by actually dying and then coming back to life. They jumped into a bonfire, burned to death, had their bones ground to powder and scattered in a river. But they had it all planned out: at the bottom of the river “they changed back into handsome boys.” After five days, disguised as magicians, they returned to Xibalba and worked many miracles for the pleasure of the Lords. They burned houses and made them whole again. They killed a man, cut out his heart in sacrifice, and brought him back to life. They killed each other, threw each other’s hearts on the grass, and then returned to life. The Lords of Xibalba couldn’t get enough. “Now do us!” they shouted. “Cut us into pieces, one by one!” And so they did.
Death is not always an end. The Popol Vuh may be one of the only texts in existence that records its own destruction. The version that has been passed down to us was translated and transcribed in the early 1700s by a Dominican monk named Francisco Ximénez, who recorded the text in twin columns, one in Spanish and the other in the language of the K’iche’ Maya, rendered phonetically in Roman letters. The source the monk copied has never been found, but archaeologists believe it was likely an older manuscript in phonetically rendered K’iche’ that can be dated with some confidence to the mid-1500s. Among the clues that make that dating possible is the fact that the surviving text refers to the city of Santa Cruz, the name bestowed by the Spanish in 1539 to the former K’iche’ capital of Utatlán, which had been leveled fifteen years earlier by the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, the most trusted, the most charming, and the handsomest of Hernán Cortés’s lieutenants.
Realizing after two profound defeats that they could not beat him on the battlefield, the two kings of the K’iche’ had sent a messenger to Alvarado. They had invited him to Utatlán to discuss the terms of their surrender. Perhaps correctly, Alvarado feared a trap. He refused to leave the plains beneath the capital, which was as much a fortress as it was a city, high in the hills above a deep ravine, with stone walls and narrow streets. Instead he invited the kings to visit him. On March 7, 1524, they complied. Alvarado later testified: “As I knew they bore ill will to His Majesty, and for the tranquility and well-being of that land, I burned them and I ordered the city burned and razed to its foundations.”
The manuscript from which Francisco Ximénez copied the Popol Vuh was likely transcribed in the years that immediately followed this holocaust, copied out hastily and hidden from the invaders. It was a task performed with the awful knowledge that nearly everything was lost. The book ends by mourning its own disappearance: “And such was the existence of the K’iche’, which can no longer be seen anywhere, because the original book [the Popol Vuh], which the kings had in ancient times, has disappeared. So it is, then, that everything about the K’iche’, which is now called Santa Cruz, has come to an end.”
We are not the first people to believe we are living at the end of time. Far from it. The K’iche’ understood that their world was ending. At some point between the arrival of Europeans in the late 1400s and the close of the nineteenth century, so did most of the people who had been living in the Western Hemisphere. For the Aztecs and the K’iche’ and the Inca and many others it came quickly, and cataclysmically. For the inhabitants of the Great Plains of North America and the desert Southwest, where I now live, Armageddon would be slower to catch up. That apocalypse is always with us: all the joy that I take from this land has been contingent on the destruction of someone else’s world.
It is not always so violent. The Maya had experienced a previous collapse, in the ninth century, when the sophisticated lowland cities of their empire were precipitously abandoned without any aid from Spaniards, firearms, or smallpox. Drought, deforestation, soil degradation, and, perhaps, the arrogance of an unresponsive elite, were enough to do it that time. Which is to say, the same things that will likely do us in: the greed and blindness of the few, the hungers of the many, a fatal inattention to the fragile web of life on which our existence here depends. The first few meters of the surface of the planet are littered with the remains of dead civilizations, people for whom the world has ended and the circle of time has closed. Why should we be special? Bones, tissue, hair quickly become soil, but metal, stone, and baked clay can last a few thousand years, long enough to keep the archaeologists in grant money for a little while longer.
There have been plenty also who were too hasty to conclude that their world was ending, countless chiliastic sects and prophets proved premature by the failure of the rapture to arrive. Recall the Baptist preacher William Miller, whose calendrical calculations and close readings of the Book of Daniel led him to predict—and his many thousands of followers from New England to Australia to believe—that at some point between March 21, 1843, and the same date of the following year history would end, and Christ would return. When that twenty-first of March passed without incident, he revised his calculations, nudging the date forward by one lunar month, to April 18. Still earthbound on the morning of the nineteenth, Miller realized that he had fudged the math again. Christ would come in autumn, he was positive this time, on October 22. But Christ did not come, not that fall and not any season since, and in the despair and disappointment that fell upon the thousands of the faithful, a world really did come to an end.
I, on the other hand, will be thrilled if I am wrong about everything. But then I don’t think Christ is coming, or the Messiah or the Mahdi or the Martians. It’s worse than that: no one can save us but ourselves.