Variations on a Theme by Milosz

T.S. Eliot
Excerpts from The Hollow Men

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
…This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Douglas Coupland
from Generation X

And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet—the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below—
And just before you’re pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines—
And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward—
Just before all of this, your best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, ‘There, I’ve always wanted to do that.’
And that’s that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you’ve been imagining since you were six, it’s all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn’t you say?

And

“a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”

Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections

“…he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you. The light in the windows was failing rapidly.”

And

“Once, when he was a boy, there was a total eclipse of the sun in the Midwest, and a girl in one of the poky towns across the river from St. Jude had sat outside and, in defiance of myriad warnings, studied the dwindling crescent of the sun until her retinas combusted. “It didn’t hurt at all,” the blinded girl had told the St. Jude Chronicle. “It felt like nothing.”

Theodore Roethke
Last Words

Solace of kisses and cookies and cabbage,
That fine fuming stink of particular kettles,
Muttony tears falling on figured linoleum,
Frigidaires snoring the sleep of plenty,
The psyche writhing and squirming in heavy woolen,-
O worm of duty! O spiral knowledge!

Kiss me, kiss me quick, mistress of lost wisdom,
Come out of a cloud, angel with several faces,
Bring me my hat, my umbrella and rubbers,
Enshroud me with Light! O Whirling! O Terrible Love!

REM
It’s the End of the World As We Know It

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it (can’t I have some time alone?)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (can’t I have some time alone?) and I feel fine

2012 Doomsday

Sam Beam
Die

And though our fathers’ fathers slept in stolen houses
All that’s over now
And our babies never cry
And we can look you in the eye
And say, “We’re not afraid to die”
And yes, our mothers’ mothers saw in black and white
But all that’s over now
And our children never lie
And no matter how we try
We are not afraid to die

Richard Wilbur
Translation of Borges’ Everness

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirror as you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe.
Whoever in its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only on the sunset’s farther side
Will see at last the Archetypes and Splendors.

And

From Blackberries for Amelia

“…as random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we now are told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.”

Robert Frost
Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

NASB
Isaiah 34:4 “And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.”
Revelation 6:12-17
12I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood;
13and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind.
14The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
15Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains;
16and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb;
17for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

The Beginning of the End

Jane: If he has withdrawn his high opinion of you, why should you care?

Elizabeth: I don’t know!
I can’t explain it.
I know I shall probably never see him again.
I cannot bear to think that he is alive in the world and thinking ill of me.

Then, later:
I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.
–Chapter 60

It comes on gradually, it would seem.

Famous Last Words

from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino:

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”