The Future is Now: a review
Title: The Future is Now
Author: Katherine Anne Porter
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Who will like it? when you need freshness.
A newspaper article drew in our speaker one morning. If an atomic bomb goes off in your vicinity, what would be the advisable course of action? In the end, there is none, except to be as far away as possible from detonation, maybe duck under a table. Our speaker broke into a hearty and carefree laugh. Why, no “deep shelters” or “bombproof cellars”? As simple as it seems.
Little things. Little joys. Living alone, watching life. Youth, lovers, passionate people, watching it all, soaking the world in. She watched a young man sandpaper and polish a beautiful fine wood table with such devoted worksmanship she couldn’t help smiling. But an intruding thought made her wonder if he were sanding the table, only to duck under it in case of an atomic bomb? Then why make it so beautiful? “Any sort of old board would do.”
If tomorrow were we stop existing, would you still plant your apple tree?
This one-sitting read touches on absurdism, and on making meaning out of the incoherent contradictions and the silence between stars that have puzzled Pascal. Our speaker doesn't approach it with skepticism and the verge of collapse. There wasn’t delivery of a tight-knit logic of reasons. Of thinking like Camus, declaring the purpose of life as making meaning out of randomness.
She brushes it off, and declares that the future is now. There is no future we are waiting for. It is a crime when people who have had their futures taken away from them, through a bomb, a flood, a famine, a hand grenade. But if you were to choose, all of those options of dying would be the same, wouldn’t it? We are not living because we fear death, and we don’t only fight to live. We live because living by itself is full of little, individual moments of life. Whether you see it through a heart that loves life or not, that is up to you.
The future is now. Don’t wait for the moment. The moment when you get a raise. An arbitrary grade. A promotion. A retirement. A new suit. A weight loss target. Or, god forbid, the ultimate eradication of some contagious disease. Don’t wait to start living, or you will wait forever.
The future is now. The future is yours. You are where you need to be, this moment, this second, and there is no other materialistic possession, or a nod of approval from someone else necessary for you to live. Don’t overthink it.
