It makes sense that with respect to the good things in our lives — the birth of a child, the wedding of a friend, the celebration of an achievement — we want to be there to experience them directly and to then re-experience them through imaginative memory. Knowing that one’s child has been born is no substitute for seeing and touching the child, and remembering the fact that the child was born is no substitute for revisiting the sensory details of just what it was like to hold him or her for the first time. We seek experiential access to what’s good — but we crave such access to the bad as well.

While we are quarantined, we want to be entertained, distracted, cheered up. And we should be grateful to those who help us with that; they will make the isolation, fear and uncertainty more bearable. But to the extent that our situation is unbearable, we also want to face that, to participate fully in what is happening to us. We use our imaginative grip on the bad to create an inner mirror of outer evils: It is only when the evils penetrate the theater of our mind that we can truly “see” them.

Pain that you can accept is almost not pain; pain that you cannot accept you call “suffering.” In “The Road,” the man and his son have, by the time we meet them, experienced so much loss and pain that they are inured to the deep sadness of their lives; they have so totally accepted the collapse of civilization that they seem, in some ways, removed from the tragedy that surrounds and suffuses them. But the reader has not been inured — she feels it, we could say, on their behalf. “The Road” is a participatory novel: The characters trudge, numb and alienated, through a wasteland, and we, the readers, take on the task of feeling their pain. The coronavirus crisis has equipped readers with especially good access to that unfelt pain: We are poised to panic over what has happened to the father and son because we fear it might happen to us. This fear is in the air all around us, and we use books and movies to bring it indoors, to breathe that suffering in as deeply as we can.

Why are we reading apocalypse fiction? Why are we watching apocalypse movies?

Because we don’t want to escape. We want to be here, now. Even if it hurts.

Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.” She writes a monthly column on public philosophy at The Point magazine.

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