Apocalypse, Constantly

Humans love to imagine their own demise.

- By Adam Kirsch

In 1985, when I was 9 years old, I watched the first episode of the new Twilight Zone, a reboot of the classic early-1960s TV series. People rarely talk about the '80s version, which ran for just three seasons. But there must be other viewers around my age who have never forgotten "A Little Peace and Quiet," the second story in that debut episode. It's about a woman who discovers a magic pendant in the shape of a sundial that gives her the power to stop time. Whenever she says "Shut up," everyone and everything in the world except her comes to a halt, resuming only when she says, "Start talking."

At first she uses the device to give herself a break from her irritating husband and chattering children. But at the end of the episode, she hears an announcement that the Soviets have launched a nuclear attack on the United States, and she deploys the magic phrase to arrest time.

In the last scene, she walks out of her house and looks up to see ICBMs frozen in midair, leaving her with an impossible choice: to unfreeze time and be destroyed along with all of humanity, or to spend eternity as the sole living person in the world.

I remember that TV image better than most of the things I saw in real life as a child. It was the perfect symbol of an understanding of history that Generation X couldn't help but absorb-if not from The Twilight Zone, then from movies such as The Day After and WarGames. The nuclear-arms race meant that humanity's destruction was imminent, even though no one actually wanted it, because we were collectively too stupid and frivolous to prevent it. We were terrified of the future, like the woman in the TV show yet we also secretly longed for the arrival of the catastrophe because only it could release us from the anxiety of waiting.