The Age of Miracles centers around Julia, an eleven year old girl living in an average California town, and the people around her. They, along with the rest of the world, learn the news that the Earth's rotation is getting longer and longer every day, a process called the slowing. This affects everything, from sleep cycles, to gravity, to how no one shows up for work, to how people act towards one another. Needless to say, the world enters a state of panic.
At the very beginning of the story, our narrator Julia describes some of the crazy things people did immediately after the news broke. She illustrates, “Our days had grown by fifty-six minutes in the night. At the beginning, people stood on street corners and shouted about the end of the world. Counselors came to talk to us at school. I remember watching Mr. Valencia next door fill up his garage with stacks of canned food and bottled water, as if preparing, it now seems to me, for a disaster much more minor. The grocery stores were soon empty, the shelves sucked clean like chicken bones. The freeways clogged immediately. People heard the news, and they wanted to move. Families piled into minivans and crossed state lines. They scurried in every direction like small animals caught suddenly under a light. But, of course, there was nowhere on earth to go.”
When faced with imminent disaster, humans will usually undertake a goal that may be useless in order to distract themselves. In the novel, no one can escape this great event, no matter where on Earth they go, but people will move anyway. They distract themselves by driving to random places, raiding grocery stores and stocking up on food, abandoning work, screaming about how it's the end times, and traveling to sacred places in their religions. Julia describes them as “small animals caught suddenly under a light”. Nothing has any effect on fixing the problem, obviously, but that isn't the point. People want to be distracted from the horrific event and feel some sort of control. The cataclysmic event doesn't cause the apocalypse, humanity's response does. This is a common theme often found in dystopias, and for good reason. Chaos is a basic consequence to one of our core emotions: fear. We should try to resist this impulse and act rationally, especially when getting to the solution requires people to work together. The passage perfectly illustrates this theme for the larger picture of the book.
However, the slowing and its consequences are symbols for something more monumental, something that every human being will have to experience: death itself. The often-said phrase “the end of days”, or “the end of the day”, is a phrase that has come to mean the death of one or many people. What the end of days means in the book is when the slowing has gotten so severe that the very meaning of a day breaks down. In the passage, Julia informs the reader that the days only grew by 56 minutes, and still, mass hysteria ensued. This is because they are afraid of the unknowns of the end of days, in the same way that an individual would be afraid of the unknowns of death. The panic that occured in the book represents the inner turmoils of a person approaching death, when they realize it is going to happen soon. They might do crazy things along the way to distract themselves, but nothing can stop the heinous, unstoppable crawl of death. The inevitability of the slowing is yet another similarity with death.
The symbolism in the story reveals the true nature of ourselves when we are approached with death and other tragedies. The hysteria that occurs when the news of a soon-to-be disaster is a very important message in The Age of Miracles. The symbolism in the story for mortality allows all readers to connect the theme to their own lives.
I picked the poem Nature because of the many similarities between the poem and The Age of Miracles for their symbols for death. Firstly, Nature begins with “As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,” which immediately ties the poem to the novel. The main plot point of The Age of Miracles is the slowing of the Earth's orbit, and therefore the days. As the story progresses, the very concept of a day deteriorates, the day is over. This is used as a symbol for death in both pieces, of the human race in the novel and in general in the poem. Another similarity between the two included how people responded to impending death. In The Age of Miracles, people start moving almost immediately to make themselves feel better. Some get supplies, some even move to a different state or country, but every action people make is to distract themselves. In Nature, the child is promised and distracted by new toys if he follows Nature on his road to mortality. Both supplies and toys are symbols for all distractions created to have a new objective to look forward to, so they won't think about how near their deaths are to their present. And at the very end of both pieces, one more similarity arises: how the unknowns and uncertainties surrounding death outweigh the knowns. The two texts almost say the same things word for word, about how we probably won't know when, how, and why we will die. All three examples of symbolism are important and are exactly why I chose Nature by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.