Happy New Year. It’s time to start thinking about the End of Days again.
The Apocalypse. The Rapture. The End of Times. The Final Reckoning. Zombies. Mad Max. Melancholia. That James Franco movie. The Mayan Calendar. The Latter Day Saints. Nostradamus. Or — our personal favorite — Y2K.
The end of days isn’t new scaremongering fodder by any means. “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief,” says 2 Peter 3:10 way back in the King James bible. “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
But the latest Apocalyptic prophecy is the Blood Moon Rapture. Coming to a city near you in 2015. “There are four eclipses and six full moons in between.” That means the world’s coming to an end. So say the latest doomsayers.
Fear of the Apocalypse sells. The cult of Prepping is big business. Stocking up on food and weapons. Packing go-bags and dry food, gas masks to fit the kids. Just turn on the news. Ebola. War. Climate Change. Famine. No clean water. The Bomb. A meteor is headed our way in 2028. “It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine,” says Michael Stipe.
The Zoroastrians, a religion older than Judaism, were the first to write about the End of Days. “And a dark cloud makes the whole sky night, and it will rain more noxious creatures than water.” Penned in 500 BC, but not too much different than a TV preacher you’d watch on public access stoned at 4AM.
“Human sacrifice! Cats and dogs, living together. Mass hysteria,” says Bill Murray in Ghostbusters.
“Some say the world will end in fire. Some say ice. What I know of desire, I’d choose fire. But if I had to die twice. Ice is nice,” says Robert Frost, more or less.
The Buddhists believe in Eternal Return. There are infinite universes and reincarnation. Or Metempsychosis. “Met him pike hoses,” Molly Bloom mispronounces it in Ulysses.
“Time is a flat circle,” says Matthew Mcconaughey in True Detectives.
Some thought the Large Hadron Collider was going to create a black hole and kill us all. Instead we made the great discovery that we barely know anything about the universe.
The terms for the scientific theories of the End of Everything: The Big Rip. The Big Freeze. The Big Bounce. The Big Crunch.
Entropy, the arrow of time.
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana,” says the bathroom wall.
The Flight of Quetzalcoatl is the Aztec story of the Beginning and End of Everything. The last line is:
“It ended with his journey to Death’s Kingdom with seven days of darkness with his body changed to light. A star that burns forever in the sky.”
Live or die, change is good.
“Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today,” Bill Murray says in Groundhog Day.
A star that burns forever in the sky.
Happy New Year.
