It so happened that several months ago, I was twenty-two and finishing the last year of my undergrad when an unprecedented pandemic swept across the world, taking with it any degree of certainty that my neighbours and I shared in our future. And it so happened that when this pandemic took place, I was in the middle of an upper-level university class on apocalypse and apocalyptic literature; irony of ironies, we thought. Of course, the apocalypses that we were studying were originally being anticipated anywhere from a thousand to two thousand years ago. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to engage with these ancient texts, imagining how their audiences sought to respond to what would most surely have been uncertain times, and with the ‘benefit’ of living through an apocalypse ourselves, my classmates and I gained a unique platform from which we could empathize with these ancient authors and audiences.

And it so happened that classes went online and we discussed apocalypse and what it felt like to anticipate such an event. And it so happened that instead of doing most of my classwork I watched a lot of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and thought about what it meant to imagine the future of the human race as explorers among the stars, having conquered the ugliness of war and prejudice and greed. It occurred to me, not for the first time, how much I love Star Trek for its relentless optimism towards the human race. As with any kind of artwork or storytelling, it is necessary to take it with a grain of salt, regarding the creators’ implicit biases and contextual circumstances. I have no illusions that the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation had cracked the code to the meaning of life, although they do a good job of making it appear as if they have. I am persistently cognizant that just as the authors of ancient apocalypses were products of Roman war and persecution, the creators of Star Trek are certainly products of the kind of thinking that produces mainstream film and TV. Nonetheless, I consider the future of the human race in Star Trek to be a most hopeful and optimistic outlook.

It so happened that in the midst of my class on apocalypse, I was assigned a ten percent assignment in which I was to break down an aspect of apocalypse for the everyday reader. I chose to focus on the concepts of genre and intertextuality, demonstrating how literature is both explicitly and implicitly in conversation with texts available within the scope of the author’s variety of influences. As an exercise in intertextuality, I wrote a song in which I, the author, took found lyrics from biblical apocalyptic literature and episodes of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and wove them into a song about hope in the face of great uncertainty. The product is a song called ‘Light Will Shine in You,’ an academic, definitely-spiritual, maybe-but-probably-not-religious hymn. I’m hoping that it will bring some sort of comfort to anybody who needs it.