Doomsday

As a young girl, I never wanted to go to sleep. I was convinced that, the moment I closed my eyes, my parents would have a party— one to which everyone but me would be invited. Always afraid that I would miss something, I tried my best to keep my eyes open. However, as it always does, sleep found ways of forcing itself upon me and I would be kept in the dark about the details of the night.
These childhood memories, or lack there of, have shaped my view of the readings for this week (The Book of Revelation, Prof. Quinby’s The Millennial Seduction, and Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending”) because, on some macro level, apocalyptic stories are just way for us to deal with the fact that we will, one day, die. Once dead, our story ends rather abruptly— we have no insight to chronicle history after the time of our death and, possibly, cannot even make sense of our death. We go through life like the characters of In the Labrynth, a book cited in Kermode’s piece: our life basically consists of our own perceptual experiences and the book, like our lives “ended where it began.”
So, it is not very surprising that the passage of time is not necessarily an intuitive matter. Again, if it were, how could the ancient Greeks and many other societies see time as circular while the Judeo-Christian West sees it as largely linear (Kermode quotes Aristotle by saying that he believed that men died because they could not join their beginnings with their ends)? Perhaps we need a narrative to tell us what come first, and what comes next. In fact, there is an emerging theory in social/personality psychology that humans need a story to make a sense of them— this is called the personal narrative and our identity is defined by how this narrative is related to the predominant culture’s narrative. All narratives need to come to an end for them to be coherent, and because we have no idea how history will end, we create doomsday stories.