An essay on our often-perverse desires for the end, from the great journal Dark Mountain. Read it here, but I suggest you also subscribe to DM here.
The announcement comes every few years, maybe more often in times of crisis. Back in the late ‘80s it was the Harmonic Convergence, some alignment of planets whose mechanics I never did quite understand and that, being rather young and unexposed to New Age ideas, I at first misheard as the name of some new and one would hope short-lived band, the Harmonica Virgins. As I recall the event was supposed to usher in a lasting new age of glorious peace and mutual well-being, which looking back now with pained gaze through the reigns of Bush and Trump and ISIS and Putin strikes me as one of the bigger miscalculations of the entire modern era.
Some years after that I was living in the Arizona heat as people were preparing for what they believed was going to be the entirely technologically instigated Armageddon of Y2K. An acquaintance of mine took to sterilizing big jars full of grains and beans in the freezer, then transferring them to what she described as a hidden alcove out in the desert, a rocky place near a spring, so that she could survive there when civilisation went to hell.
It didn’t. When the time came some friends and I, luxuriating in that period of late young adulthood before kids arrived, took some food and champagne and went backpacking off into the desert. We figured that it was saner to come back to reports of wholesale disaster than to live it in the moment. But in this too we were disappointed. Once we’d hiked back to the truck stop where we’d left the cars we checked a newspaper to find nothing more consequential than that Boris Yeltsin had resigned as the chief executive of Russia.
And the acquaintance? She had a hell of a lot of beans and rice and lentils to polish off. I never did hear too much about those meals.
By now, in my life experience, this has happened often enough that I recognise the pattern. There is, first of all, the aching sense that the end of things has got to come soon, real soon, before the end of our own all-too-short time on Earth, because how could that glory go to someone else? There is the creation of an elaborate eschatology—the careful calculations of timing, the who’s in/who’s out assessments at least as intricate as the backroom political maneuverings of any Washington or Pyongyang. And finally there is the PR, the ready forgetting of any previously forecast ends of the world through a simple immersion in the obvious reality of the impending one just around the corner. As Bullwinkle would put it, ‘This time, for sure!’
It hasn’t ever been for sure, of course, and for me the most poignant time comes just afterwards. Some years ago when the end was supposed to come according to precisely worked out understandings of the ancient Mayan calendar a friend was driving west through Kansas and noticed skeins of people standing on the highway bridges.
‘What’s going on?’ she wondered aloud when she stopped at the Quik-Mart.
‘They think the end of the world is coming,’ said the cashier.
‘Oh, then I probably don’t need to pay for my drink, right?’
‘It ain’t the end of my world, honey.’
And so she drove on, as did the economy of quick fill-ups and super-sized sodas and Slim Jim jerky bars. But what I wonder is what it was like to stand there up on one of those bridges as the afternoon wore on, as the sidelong embarrassed looks proliferated, and whether once the forlorn waiting for the call of trumpets or the opening of the heavens or (this being Kansas after all) some whirlwind got to be too much everyone just filed away silently. Or did they speak to one another? In some other place this might have been occasion for some profound French-inflected bit of wisdom such as We can’t go on. We must go on. But in the American Midwest it was probably some foot-shuffling reflection like Well, guess I’d better be going now – I figure the dogs must be hungry.
This kind of thing has happened often and fervently enough that I have come to wonder if we just have the wrong idea about endings, and ends. Maybe the end of the world has come after all. A few years ago, a millennial sect made a remarkably but not uniquely precise calculation by adding up the extent of all the begats and reigns and wars in the various Testaments and came up with the announcement that the Rapture really was going to occur one May 21, at 6 PM Daylight Saving Time, which by the way is not evenly distributed throughout Arizona, where I live, and so if you want to get all nitpicky the event was slated to occur an hour apart on the two sides of a town that’s split by the line between time zones. That would have been a pretty interesting hour.
But I digress. What, I wondered a day later when I read an AP story purporting that the end of the world had not taken place, what if it was not the time that was incorrect, but rather the signs? What if the end-times believers had been totally spot-on? What if, like an oblivious diner refusing to see in the pattern of scorch marks on a piece of toast the clearly outlined, divinely placed visage of the Virgin Mary, it is just that we are too obtuse about what to look for? What if instead of giant earthquakes causing the earth to shake and split apart the long-looked-for signals were more like a delicious little shiver from nature, a tease rather than an ecstasy of destruction? Could it have been something as subtle as an unseasonably cool breeze shaking the nascent leaves and setting them to flutter in a way that no one had really paid sufficient attention to before, or a shower of gentle rain providing the perfect coda to a long drought?
What if the Rapture were heralded by a flurry of song from horny birds celebrating the lambent falling light of dusk – that undefinable quality of color that is a depth, a saturation, rather than a nameable hue – or even by a particular young boy in Arizona, furiously concentrated, who managed to ride his red bicycle without training wheels for the first time?
What if the only sign of the culmination of God’s grand design were something as simple as an asparagus stalk, taut with spring’s irrepressible longing, flicking away the final covering of dirt particles (and let’s not get into a discussion of exactly what those are) and emerging to sunlight at last?
What if that were the sign, and not only the notice of God’s intent but His final word on the matter?
And what if not just you and I, but everyone had such a misguided notion of God’s plan that in His eye-rolling offense at our failure of attention He decided that He would in fact be more comfortable for all eternity continuing to putter around alone in His house of many rooms, muttering to Himself as hermits will do about the iniquities of the world beyond the doors and enduring the occasional tedious visits from the impulsive Jesus and the wheezy Holy Ghost? What if it finally dawned on us, on all of us, that we are not invited to reside in that most opulent of mansions? What if it turned out that we have no reason to hope for the wild surmise of a new heaven?
Well, we might conclude that we’re better off anyway without the draining seduction of an afterlife. Who wants to go live with an omniscient old fart Who has already done up the décor and promulgated all the rules? It would be like being a teenager again. Would you really feel comfortable there, padding around on stockinged feet, careful always to not make too much noise, tell an off-color joke, or leave lint on the white sofas? What kind of music could you listen to? Would you be able to rock out to the Flaming Lips on discreetly hidden speakers, or only with the privacy of ear buds? Would you have to offer to help with the dishes? What’s some tribulation at home compared to the perennial awkwardness of the pampered houseguest?
The real reason people long for the end of the world is that the world is constantly beginning, over and over again, and this reinvention comes in so many guises that just contemplating them can leave you as simultaneously filled and drained and exhausted as a new lover spent in the long slanting light of evening. Call me pagan, I guess, or a bad investor who wants to cash in his returns right now: I’ll take the way the light swells or declines to something new, and the crows cacking their way back to the spruce for a night of restless sleep, and the kid riding his bike, immune not to falls but, far more priceless, to exhausting worries about endings. And I’ll take living in a hilly place where a new bike rider, after panting his way up past the neighbours’ house, gets to turn and take the ride of his life (so far), a magic coast downhill, earning the hard dividends of gravity that begin again, over and over, whenever you’ve put the work into the climb.
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