By Eric Le Roy
‘Rhapsody’ by William Stanley Braithwaite:
I am glad daylong for the gift of song,
For time and change and sorrow;
For the sunset wings and the world-end things
Which hang on the edge of to-morrow.
I am glad for my heart whose gates apart
Are the entrance-place of wonders,
Where dreams come in from the rush and din
Like sheep from the rains and thunders.
Content 18+ This afternoon, in Varna, Bulgaria where I live, I sat with my dogs in the small wooded area that we have come to think of as our ‘spot’. It was 4.30 in the afternoon, and given the time of year the daylight was making its last speech, and the charcoal waters of the Black Sea put me in mind of Jules Verne’s description in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which I was reading today with one of my Chinese students: “My flocks, like those of Neptune’s old shepherds, graze fearlessly in the immense prairies of the ocean.” Everything around us seemed to take on a glowing copper color, and the red-clad houses on the opposite hill brought to mind a suggestion of hidden gaiety buried in something bleak and austere – as among lowly servants when safely in the shadows of the scullery, and their ‘betters’ all cinched together ‘at table’ for dinner in a great house of the past.
But in fact no people could be seen anywhere. This was the third day of 2025. It was not too difficult to say goodbye to 2024. In many respects, last year could rank among the worst in memory. One could make a list or post a bad news bulletin for each separate category, including, foremost, the threat of nuclear war, climate change, and the intimidation factor brought on by the march of Artificial Intelligence.
Since humans figured out how to tell time, we have lived according to one clock or another; but now it’s not only the clock that drives us from the pillow to the parkway each workday morning. There is another one known as The Doomsday Clock. It’s purely imaginative, of course, a symbolic representation of impending human catastrophe on a grand scale. Armageddon, or something like that. And unlike a smartwatch which can tell you how well you slept or what your pulse rate is now compared to three minutes ago, the Doomsday Clock tells us how close we are to Human Midnight. The Clock’s original setting was in 1947 (when it was 7 minutes to midnight). According to Wikipedia, “it has since been set backward 8 times and forward 17 times. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 90 seconds, set in January 2023.”
Anyway you look at it, 1.5 minutes is a pretty short time. Some people have sex and are in the shower before 90 seconds are up. For others, it takes that long to remember their spouse’s name at a party or put on their shoes the right way after a night on the sauce. It’s a ‘relativity’ issue, you see.
But it all boils down to the headlong collision course the human race appears to be on with regard to nuclear weapons. For all the braying and boasting of the warhawk Russians – much of which can be shrugged off as sabre-rattling designed to intimidate the rest of the world – there is a very real danger – in my view, an overwhelming danger – that sooner or later it will come to that: the wrong dictator or religious fanatic with power will get a wild hair up his rectum and start the process, or – as was the case with WWI– it will be some puny would-be revolutionary squirt with evil intentions who will ignite the festivities.
So it got me thinking of other times in the history of the world when it seemed the End Was Nigh. I want to go through a few of them now, bearing in mind that, just as most people have a latent fascination with the onset of the moment of death they so desperately ‘dread’, so does the human race enjoy, deep in its primordial core, the ecstasy of slaughter and the orgasm of mass annihilation. Dispute me if you will, but I have never been more sure of anything in my life. The urge to self-destruct is mingled, beautifully and horrifically, with the frantic will to survive. This is why nightmares often end with turning to meet the zombie with his gelid eyes, taking a deep breath, and running into his arms. It is why the French call orgasm the ‘la petite mort’. The little death.
The first armageddon must have been before the dinosaurs, but I doubt if it was felt as the great lizards did. Try to suspend all disbelief and imagine you are looking at things from a dinosaur’s point of view. For 165 MILLION years, you have ruled the earth. The fruit of the trees of the Garden of Eden is yours, seemingly forever, or for light years of time that we, in our human capacity, can speak of but not conceptualize in lived or even imagined terms; they are too many years to even try to count, because old age would overtake us before we uttered our way through the beginning mass of digits.
I would say that 165 million years is the next best thing to immortality.
And then one day it all goes up in smoke: a great shudder occurs without warning and you drown in the unbreathable dirt that was the air. You writhe and gasp and thrash with your great, once lethal tails, and then you cease to be. For the dinosaurs this was the end of the world. Except it wasn’t, not for the rodents and simple cretins that crawled away under the holocaust of dust. They lived. They made it through the annihilation of the perpetual order. But what did the lizard brains register at the end of what had seemed like a reign forged of the vegetables of infinity?
In human history one of the great universal ‘myths’ – as we call them now – concerned some great flood that must have swallowed the land and almost everything in it. We can trace it back to the Sumerians (circa 2300 BCE), when we hear of a monumental deluge that wiped out humanity (except for the chosen few). This Flood legend reverberates throughout the remnant accounts that we can read from the surviving clay tablets and crude indentations on stone. In the Hebrew bible, we hear the story of Noah’s Arc. The exodus of ‘good’ floating upon the drowned carcasses of ‘evil.’
So what real happening might they have been talking about? Was there indeed an apocalyptic event that made humans imagine that civilization was at an end? It is not hard to imagine. In those days, when goliath gods roamed at will, bestowing and foreclosing on all aspects of human destiny, why would such a catastrophe, born on the angry horizon, the very countenance of nihilism, not bear down on pilgrims, peasants and perverts alike, all crouching in fear, amid a Thunder and Lightning signifying the Once and For All?
The Fall of the Roman Empire was for many a World’s End event. After all, this was the rape and murder of the civilized world, the collapse of order and the barbarian whore culture of molestation and raging celebration of deflowering innocence, salivating blasphemy, and the gleeful destruction of everything even corrupt Europe had stood for, trusted, and feared in its moments of reflection and sanity. It did not happen overnight; there was time to think about it, but maybe that time allotment was more excruciating than a fast kill would have been. What can be worse than watching the walls of your world being put to the torch by marauders with the breath of horses and private parts that smelled like Roman sewers? What can be worse than having your executioner piss on your mirror as you try to take a last look at yourself and all you once were? It happened in Rome and it happened again when the Turks broke the resistance of Constantinople, ending the Eastern Empire. For many Roman citizens the world ended just as it did once on a sunny morning in Pompeii when Vesuvius decided to smother and crush the world of happy denizens of the provincial get-away city below,
The next great End of the World event I shall call attention to was the Bubonic Plague, otherwise known as the Black Death. Moving in from Asia, stacking putrid corpses as it went, it arrived in the harbor of Genova, Italy, in 1347. It advanced faster than a German army and decimated Europe, killing one third of the population. Since this was back in the day when Christianity, which promised eternal bliss to the ‘good’ and everlasting, flame-ripped damnation to the ‘bad’, held virtual dominion over human minds, it is not a stretch of the imagination to guess at what people were thinking as they dropped to the floor, shrieking in agony at lunchtime, following a hearty breakfast during the dawn. Surely, God was punishing the world for its sins. Divine Retribution was at hand.
No, as a matter of fact it was fleas riding on rats that caused it, but how would they have known? They did the Dance of Death instead. “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posey, ashes, ashes, all fall down.” That’s what the children sang in the days of the Black Death, when wagons and carts crunched through the unlit medieval streets, hoarse voices crying “Bring Out Your Dead” and waiting until the rotting bodies fell from the balconies to be delivered to gaping holes in the ground, mass graves the Nazis would have admired.
The End of the World.
And was it any different for the victims of the Holocaust that the German Nazis chose to inflict on their fellow men and women, many of whom were German citizens and friends and neighbors of their eventual executioners? What did those Jews think as they were herded into the ‘showers’ and crammed into the ovens? Did they not wonder why God had deserted them? Was it not the End of the World for every Jew (and others who were condemned by the Reich) who stood scrunched together, skinny and naked, while waiting for the cyanide pellets to drop? And for the Russians, who now celebrate Victory Day – did the millions who died and whose last view of the world was a Nazi bayonet or a Nazi noose – did they foresee and foretell the glorious future – or did the World End at that moment?
In 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world within seconds of a nuclear war, didn’t the End Seem Nigh? Nuclear war was averted only by the insight of a Russian who demanded a double checking of a false indication that the Americans had launched a nuclear attack. Nobody even remembers who he was; it was Vasiliy Aleksandrovich Arkhipov. He should be honored as one of the heroes of the 20th century. But nobody knows he existed, this real life saviour of the planet.
Wasn’t it true that many people predicted a total crash down at midnight before the year 2000? Didn’t they fiddle with their computers, hoping that these mythological gods didn’t die on their laps, and weren’t these atheists reduced to prayer, albeit reaching out to the mere God of Chance? Praying to a cyber oracle, a Crystal Ball conjured by clicks? But life went on unabated. And the next day, abyss averted, they all went to the donut and bagel shops. No God, no Armageddon. False alarm. And then the Trade Towers went to hell. And afterwards, the donut and bagel shops were full again.
And isn’t it tempting to think it will always be this way?? I myself am not religious but I respect the religious point of view and, if we can elevate it beyond preachy dogma to something higher, a more ’spiritual’ state of mind that asks, not for obedience to a god but to an honest confrontation with the endless mirrors of the self – if such is not purely illusion and we really do have that choice, should we not accept that Armageddon has come and gone already, and many times over, in the child’s playground, snuffing out lives at their bare beginning – for reasons that will always elude us – and then life went on like nothing happened ? Can we ever accept such humility? I can’t? Maybe you can.
This truth – one day it will come – one way or the other it will come, it will come like a whisper in your ear or a tickle in the ribs. Or it will come like a heart attack in the kitchen or a fatal collision on the road or a terrorist’s bomb in the mall. In an instant you will die the death of all people who have ever lived. But really there but one death, your own; every other death is a fiction, and those who seemed alive were only ghosts. The world began when you began, and the world ends when you end..
Or it will come in worse ways. The loss of health and the end of hope. When gray or dismally beige walls become a second skin. When the wife or husband dies, when the dog is dead, when the daylight fades amid the gathering shrouds and all memories seem like the defeat of heaven in a nightmarish room of Hell, boring hell without even the excitement of fire – hours of doom that must be endured, especially when you know you don’t deserve this; other promises were made – then finally, in a nursing home or a public street, you understand the dinosaurs at last, and reckon, accurately, that they died the death for you already – and suffered your agonies – those millions of years ago.
It will be your turn to do it again, but take solace by understanding that, as they came and went, the great lizards were successful. Death is the one thing everybody succeeds at doing alone. The end of the world happens every day: to the rulers of nations and to the retarded confined to institutional rooms, to opera singers with mighty voices, to invalids staring out the window at what must surely be eternity.
