The End is Near!

There was a period (still occasionally reprised) when cartoons in the New Yorker and its ilk always included one with a robed figure on the streets of the city, carrying a sign reading: "The End Is Near!"

from Conde Nast

It was a good, simple setup for gags, something everyone understood instantly, so there was no need to waste time explaining background.  I read an article today that made me think of those cartoons.

At first, I thought that Rob Goodman, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, was going to take an interesting tack on my thoughts about mourning and when is the best time to shuffle off the mortal stage.

"We flatter ourselves when we imagine a world incapable of lasting without us in it—a world that, having ceased to exist, cannot forget us, discard us, or pave over our graves. Even if the earth no longer sits at the center of creation, we can persuade ourselves that our life spans sit at the center of time, that our age and no other is history's fulcrum..."

But then he moves on to a grander canvas, looking interestingly at the full picture of apocalyptic legend and literature for humanity.

"In music, a progression that resolves to a minor chord is more pleasant than one that fails to resolve at all; in the same way, even a story of the end of the world may be more comforting than the thought of history as an endless, pointless series of 'one damn thing after another,' something too immense and amorphous to be captured by story. Kant, in fact, suggested in his 'Idea for a Universal History' that it's unbearable to imagine history without plan and purpose. Whether or not such a plan exists, we would be paralyzed unless we acted as if it does: 'For what is the good of esteeming the majesty and wisdom of Creation ... if we are forced to turn our eyes from it in disgust, doubting that we can ever find a perfectly rational purpose in it. ... ?'"

Goodman moves on, by way of George Orwell's 1984, to Olaf Stapledon, author of Last and First Men.  "His treatment of history and apocalypse made him one of the last century's most innovative authors of science fiction. His work, which imagined the course of humankind from the 1930s to its extinction in two billion years, reached an astronomical scope. And his refusal to flinch from historical randomness led to a kind of fiction far more disturbing than the alternately self-pitying and reassuring dystopias of our time—and also, in the end, more honest and more humanist. The question at its heart is a lasting challenge to our political imaginations: If we lose our faith that history is going somewhere, how should we behave?"

Fascinating.  Though it sounds profoundly depressing, it seems something worth finding.

However, in the end (of this blog entry, at least), I can only think of a favorite quote from H.P. Lovecraft:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents ... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”