Apocalypse: waves and mountains
[ by Charles Cameron — with delighted appreciation to historian Damien Kempf ]
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Damien Kempf asks, “So… what’s the apocalypse really going to be like?” and tweets 15 signs of the end times, in images from the 16th century Bodleian MS, Douce 134:
The first sign of the Apocalypse: the sea rises to the mountain tops pic.twitter.com/cA96f4Qx4t
— Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) October 9, 2016
Now you see them — the waves, I mean —
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— and now you don’t!
The second sign of the Apocalypse: the sea descends out of sight pic.twitter.com/Xj9AZ66pQH
— Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) October 9, 2016
Oops!
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As I wrote in Theory and Practice, Ideal and Real, War and Peace a while back:
There are two distinct scenarions that I try to bear in mind, in one of which an archipelago of islands is seen in a seascape, while the other shows a number of lakes in a landscape of mountains, hills and valleys.
The only difference between them, as I envision them, is the water level.
Raise the water level, and the lakes join to become a sea in which the isolated remaining hill and mountain tops have become islands — lower the water level, and the islands become the hills and mountain tops of a landscape, with the sea now diminished to a congeries of lakes and pools in its valleys.
Your thoughts?
October 10th, 2016 at 9:36 pm
Since you asked, when I think of archipelago, I think of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, in which he wrote:
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“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
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During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.”
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So maybe we should keep an eye out for the rising and falling tides of the sea, but we should also keep in mind what’s going on with the personal moral tides in each of us.
October 10th, 2016 at 10:12 pm
One of my favorite Solzhenitsyn quotes, maybe the only one.
And Amen.