Bedtime Stories for Unhappy Children: You Must Believe in Spring

My name is Illuryk and it has been winter on Earth for 72 years.

Everything changed when the bombs fell. Dark, ominous clouds enveloped our planet, and the temperatures rapidly plummeted until the average temperature around the equator was -22 degrees Celsius. Now our world is always dark, and storms rage across the surface of it constantly—although most of us don’t remember a time when there was light anyways. It has been so long that the youngest of us refuse to believe there has ever been anything but.

My great-grandfather Illyupatek tells me stories about warmth. He says that when he grew up there were four seasons, and during the warmer periods he would run around the great green hills that surrounded his village. He tells me about flowers, lakes, and colorful birds. Nobody has seen any of these things for generations. This world is harsher than his, and the community you live with is more important than it has ever been.

We survive in small villages—I can only assume there are other small pockets of humanity littered about—thanks solely to salvaged old-world technology. My little village consists entirely of five underground buildings powered by an old-world geothermal power plant, which probably functions in our society as church did in eras before. Everything in our little life revolves around this plant, for if it goes out we all die.

So it goes in our little corner of the world.

…

My mother works at the hydroponics lab across from the residential unit, and my older brother Illarynek is an engineer at the power plant. We don’t talk about my father anymore.

But I wanted to write something about him just to feel his presence. My father was a man displaced from his own era, a scholar and a poet that saw the brutal conditions of life here and decided one day to walk out into the snow on his own accord. Some say he went mad, others claim suicide, but the official records say he went on an expedition to find other survivors. I think the governor put that down so we wouldn’t fall into a deep state of despair like he did.

I take more after my father than I do my mother, much to her dismay. But I think there is something he misunderstood about this world, and I want to make it known, even if only I will ever read this. Perhaps a future historian will find this and gain a little glimmer of insight into the century after the war.

But first I must check the weather and ensure that heat is adequately dispersed around our station. Today it is 14 degrees Celsius outside of our little community, and the wind is blowing at 72 kilometers per hour. It is a good day in the grand scheme of things, and we might take the kids outside to try and see the sun. Occasionally a hole in the clouds will part due to shifting winds, and if you squint just right through the gales you can see a little pocket of sunshine emerge. I’ve seen this seven times in my life, and one of my favorite things to do is to take the littles out for their first. Last week Pokmark saw his first glimpse of sun and he actually cried. So it goes in our little corner of the world.

…

My father was a learned man and understood this world has seen significantly better days. He studied the collection of books left here by researchers before the war with manic fervor until his own sanity wore thin and the dim halls of our world reverberated like agony inside of his consciousness. His knowledge was a double edged sword; it was the light in his dark world and the only reason he had to live, but it was also the basis of the pessimism which eventually drove him to death. The only way he could soothe himself was through studying, but it was the studying itself which took his own life.

He was right in identifying how bleak and hopeless this world was, but he was wrong in giving up hope. Have you ever listened to a beautiful piece of music, with rich dissonance that leaves you longing? Would that music not be so beautiful if the dissonance did not create the desire for a better world? If everything was consonant, there would be no need for hope, but there would also be no tension and beauty in this world.

Yesterday evening—station time—during a strange lull of wind, I sat outside in the snow with the love of my life Opal. We watched the snowflakes drift down gently from the sky, and I cannot imagine this world has ever been so beautiful as it is in bleakness. Do you know why my great-grandfather romanticizes the grass, lakes, and birds? Only because our world is so bleak. If everything was fine and cozy he would never idealize the simple existence he had as a boy the way he does now. And I see the warmth it creates in his chest; his longing for a better world gives him the fire to go on that he paradoxically lacked before our world tore itself apart.

The Christian mythology I read from the archives seems to have missed this point as well. Adam ate the apple and fell from Eden, but this is cast as a bad thing in the mythos. What is Eden if Eden is all? In the Christian myth, Eden can only take on its form through original sin and the fall from grace. Only through man being an imperfect creature can the ideal of perfection even make sense. Thus the Christian should see Adam’s fall as the most beautiful thing of all. Imperfection gives rise to the hope for perfection, whereas with perfection alone there is nothing.

And this perfection, or for us a better world, will never be obtained. My father understood that a better world could never be obtained, but he did not understand that this inherent tension is what creates the conditions for hope, beauty, and love in the first place. And so he killed himself without ever discovering the rich dissonance of existence. Or more specifically, he never realized that dissonance is precisely what can make our lives worth living in the first place.

The point is not to obtain a better world; the point is merely to hope for one. And for that reason alone, I implore you dear reader—you must believe in spring.