Writing During the End of the World

Writing During the End of the World

By Soha Kassab

Edited by Naomi Adam

Ahead of the imminent release of The Letters Page Volume 5, members of the web and production teams are taking a closer look at some of the letters that made it to print. Their reflections offer a sneak preview of the pieces included in the new edition and the wide-ranging themes they explore. Today, we turn to a letter from Ljubljana by Manca Renko, a sharp and self-aware meditation on handwriting, translation, and the uneasy business of writing in a world that refuses to stand still.

It can be particularly embarrassing to try and write beautifully while the world is falling apart. The feeling of moral disarray is unmistakable to anyone who has stared at the blinking cursor of a laptop while they scrolled past news reports of airstrikes, displacement or state violence. At that moment, all the words you’re assembling and all the poems you’re editing feel like an echo from a world that shouldn’t exist. The tragedies and the horrors are happening somewhere else, and yet here you are, honing a metaphor or altering the tone of an article. It’s not guilt exactly, though guilt is just around the corner. It’s something far more perplexing: the question of whether art, writing and intellectual work have any ethical authority when weighed against actual, tangible suffering.  

When Slovenian historian and editor Manca Renko, who has long been invested in the politics of intellectual labour and women’s writing, considers the act of sending a letter, she anchors her thoughts in the uncomfortable immediacy of the world rather than abstraction. Her piece for The Letters Page starts out as a lighthearted reflection on handwriting, translation, and the fear of writing without lines, but gradually, she allows the outside world to intrude. So when she writes, ‘I’m ashamed that all I can do during a genocide is this: write a fucking letter’, she brutally captures the unease of being a writer who can only respond to the disasters from the sidelines. It’s a confession that echoes well beyond its own page, perfectly poised between horror and irony. 

Renko’s disdain can’t be considered unfamiliar or rare; it’s a sentiment that has plagued intellectuals and academics for decades now. Yet it hits differently now because our political present isn’t a mere sequence of emergencies, but rather it is a crowded, concurrent catastrophe. To write today is to confront a world in which Gaza is one catastrophe in a landscape already collapsing. Sudan is pushed to the frame of what the headlines can tolerate, its destruction intermittently visible, intermittently ignored. 

Like a faulty bulb, the writer’s conscience flickers between these violent sites. And somewhere in that flicker sits the question: What does it mean to write ethically in such a world? 

The conundrum at hand isn’t merely emotional; it’s philosophical. The tension of whether aesthetics can remain innocent in the face of political catastrophe was foreseen by Theodore Adorno, who observed, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ This line, often misquoted and misunderstood, remains unavoidable in the face of repeated global injustice. Adorno, among many other philosophers, cautioned that our criticism of ideology would eventually lead to a sort of conceptual and intellectual dead-end, not because ideologies had won, but because we have grown so entwined with it that any attempt to break free simply spirals us back in. That sense of being feels extremely tangible right now, watching modern-day political horrors, while attempting to create anything resembling poetry or art. Even Manca Renko echoes Adorno’s unease when she states, ‘I could have written clutching at life, but metaphors during a genocide are barbaric.’ Her hesitation isn’t a writer’s choice, but a subtle exposé of the same ethical crisis: the fear that language, in the face of real suffering, risks becoming a type of violence of its own. This is the prominent fear among writers that the space from which we used to critique the world no longer sits outside the world’s machinery.

Today’s writer isn’t a distant witness, but a participant in the same global system that streams images of suffering alongside targeted ads and algorithm distractions.  

This cul-de-sac is exactly where contemporary writers find themselves. One is horrified by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but there’s also the massacres in Sudan, the humanitarian crisis in Congo and the inhumane regression in the Xinjiang region, and every other place where history repeats itself in real time. To write about one feels like a betrayal of the others; to write about none feels like a betrayal of oneself. When the writer comes in contact with reality, that righteous bubble they had imagined living in (detached from the system, above it, resisting it) dissolves completely. The possibility of a moral space outside culture or society is vanishing because when society and criticism mirror each other so perfectly, our acts of reflection run the risk of turning into another form of integration. 

We are, as Adorno once warned, in a hall of mirrors. 

But perhaps the real question is, does writing become complicit in atrocity by virtue of being written during it? Is writing during these modern-day calamities deemed ‘barbaric’ if poetry written after Auschwitz was? The question is not rhetorical; it’s an ethical prompt that disturbs the writer’s desire for moral safety and self-preservation. For who among us, armed with a laptop and an opinion, isn’t at least slightly enticed by the notion that writing matters, that it soothes, that it resists, that it stands for something? 

With that said, there’s still a possibility that writing can shift from an exploration of conscience to a performance of it. The ease with which bystanders can turn anguish into a beautiful piece, the temptation to transform others’ horror into raw material. The urge to say something can very quickly become a desperate attempt to cleanse oneself of guilt rather than an act that attends to the sufferers themselves. 

Refusing to write, however, is hardly a solution. Silence, too, holds political implications. It could be done as a sign of respect, but it can also be a sign of desertion and abandonment. The outcome is a paralysis at the heart of the literary conscience: silence feels immoral, and speaking feels insufficient.

This is where Renko’s letter offers something valuable because it takes a stand rather than trying to provide an answer. She doesn’t pretend her writing has moral weight it does not possess. She neither hides behind the brittle barrier of literary distance nor aesthetizes Gaza’s suffering. Instead, she highlights the exact paradox: I am writing while people die. I know this. I cannot resolve it. I am writing anyway. It doesn’t provide a solution, but it displays honesty. And honestly, at an age of curated moral performances, being honest might be one of the final ethical options available to the writer. 

In this day and age, writing morally calls for recognising that every sentence is written inside a burning house. To write anyway is not an act of purity, but an act of responsibility. It is not putting out the fire, but bearing witness to its heat, its smoke, and the people trapped inside.

It is not enough. But it is something.

If you feel compelled to respond to the world, The Letters Page team are back in the office and ready to read your real letters again. We publish stories, essays, poems, memoirs, reportage, criticism, recipes, travelogues, and any hybrid forms, so long as they come to us in the form of a letter. We are looking for writers of all nationalities and ages, both established and emerging.

Your letter must be sent by post to:

The Letters Page, School of English, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

See our submissions page for more information.