Apocalypse

I'll go with one word that I really like, and then a couple of related passages.

Apocalypse comes directly from the Greek word apokalupsis, and literally means revelation, usually in reference to a final day of judgment. An "apocalypse" is a revelation at the end of the world, or a prophecy of such a revelation. In popular usage, though, apocalypse usually takes on a simpler meaning: "the end of the world as we know it."

The word we should be using is eschaton, which really does mean "the end of the world" or "climax of history" or "the day on which the apocalypse occurs" or "the day at the end of time." The complete phrase is apokalupsis eschaton, "the revelation at the end of an age."

Pretty cool, right?

Here's my favorite part: apokalupsis comes from the Greek verb apokalyptein, "to uncover or unveil." And (according to Wikipedia) the most literal translation of apokalupsis is not "the revelation," but "the lifting of the veil."

So when we talk about the apocalypse, the end of the world, we're talking about the lifting of the veil. Isn't that poetic?

Yeah, it's only because we swapped apokalupsis for eschaton that we have this poetic mistranslation, but still, it's a description with some merit: when this age (say the age of humans, or the age of life on earth) ends, it's the lifting of the veil - the end of an illusion or the waking from a dream.

That's probably a lot more etymology than anyone wants, so how about some cool apocalyptic passages:

These two are from The Road, a new post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy. The two characters, a father and his young son, are just barely alive after a nuclear war killed everything. No plants, no animals, no blue skies, no sunsets - the world has become an empty gray waste that's always cloudy and always cold.

"He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone." (11)

I admire the way McCarthy abuses the crap out of standard grammar. I think there are only two complete sentences in that paragraph. But his language is so solid - lots of heavy words, everything is strong and balanced - that the fragments don't bother me at all. Instead of a fluid narrative, that flows like a ribbon, he's serving up little chunks of language like gravel. But you still get a good sense of rhythm - "carried forth and scattered and carried forth again" has a back and forth, soft-to-hard-to-soft kind of swishiness that I like a lot, and the paragraph as a whole has a consistent slow cadence.

"They sat there in silence with their hands outheld to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the cold despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever." (88-9)

I just like the idea of the entire world melting away. Once the physical stuff is gone, your memory of all those things begins to fade. The physical world was destroyed by a war and now the man's mental image of that world is rotting away to nothing. I especially like the final image, "Drawing down like something to preserve heat." The man's body fights to keep warm in the cold, and his mind fights to maintain the memories of life, warmth, color, and meaning in the empty gray wasteland, but both are going to lose to the cold eventually.

A slightly happier view of the (human) apocalypse, from Sara Teasdale:

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

[...]

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.