Just as the government hysteria over the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be dying down, new threats have arisen to occupy our attention and fuel our fears: food shortages, spiking inflation, rocketing gas prices, and a Ukraine-Russia conflict that threatens to bring about a world war.
Is this the end of the world as we know it? Or is this the beginning of the end of the world?
Will the world end with a bang or will it end, as T.S. Eliot concludes, with a whimper?
Robert Frost, torn between a vision of the world ending in fire (the hot flame of violence, anger and greed) or ice (the cold burn of hatred), suggests that either would suffice to do the job.
And then there’s the Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz, who envisioned the day the world ends as a day like any other: “Those who expected lightning and thunder are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps do not believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above, as long as the bumblebee visits a rose, as long as rosy infants are born, no one believes it is happening now… There will be no other end of the world.”