Life, as some wit by the name of Elbert Hubbard said over a century ago, is just one blankety-blank thing after another.Luckily for us, in the intervening decades, some wise man called Albert Einstein came along to reassure us – by demonstrating that time exists just so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Nor is [...]

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This is the way dreams end, not with a smile but a sigh

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Life, as some wit by the name of Elbert Hubbard said over a century ago, is just one blankety-blank thing after another.Luckily for us, in the intervening decades, some wise man called Albert Einstein came along to reassure us – by demonstrating that time exists just so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Nor is it monotonous – like in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s nightmare, where “life is not just one blankety-blank thing after another; it’s the same blankety-blank thing over and over again”. Looks to me, though, like all good things are coming to an end. In short order. Like the Olympics (August), the odious appeal of the Twilight saga in the aftermath of the Kristen Stewart infidelity imbroglio (September), the long October holidays (October – duh). (Two out of three is a fail, dears.)

Just the other day, watching the moon rise over Kandalama, your scribe was reminded of the sad day not too long ago when the citizens of the third rock from the sun received – with a sense that an era had ended – the news that Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, had passed into the great Sea of Tranquillity in the sky. The world wept. In a way that it does not pause to do when pop stars and sweetheart princesses die. But life goes on. Felix Baumgartner makes a giant leap from space back to earth, stepping off a small perch almost 25 miles above the globe at the edge of the planet’s stratosphere. ‘Curiosity’, the Mars rover, continues its expectant interrogation of the Red Planet. Voyager – that intrepid explorer and vehicle for ferrying humanity’s dreams through the island of stars in the firmament we know as the Milky Way – continues to float almost unobtrusively into interstellar night, as it takes the plunge beyond our solar system into the inky black depths of our spiral arm’s starless space.

In the meantime, happenings around the globe – in our galaxy’s only known cradle of life – seem to indicate that nature is not only red in tooth and claw, but churning for a mineral and vegetable feast as well. Mother Earth’s womb is being ripped open, every day, on some far-flung corner of the oblate spheroid we call home. This week was a case in point. A three-foot-high wave swept over Hawaii’s shores as a 7.7-richter quake stirred up the ocean bed off the west coast of the North American continent. Storm warnings echoed around the earth’s shores from New York over Sandy to Tamil Nadu over Nilam. Tremors in valleys, plains, and plateaux. Lightning arcing across raging skies and plunging like a knife into the belly of the poisoned waters. There were scattered earthquakes too. And wars and rumours of wars. Sounds familiar to the faithful? The end may be nigh.

As recently as all-hallows’ eve, someone asked your favourite Sunday columnist whether there would really be three days of utter darkness at the end of this year. Apparently the so-called Mayan calendar’s doomsday scenarios, which died a natural death at the hands of scientific debunking of putative long-range prophecy, are being resurrected here and there. And sensationalists are now quoting supposedly authoritative sources – from Nostradamus to NASA – to authenticate the end of the world. This year. In December. Preferably on the much hyped 21st. If that can be managed. (Please note, God or Gaia or whoever’s in charge of the earth, pale dot, big blue marble!) I was hard-pressed to essay an answer. Cold hard facts sound hollow in the face of the signs of the times. My interlocutor was not assured, either. She thinks – like so many Sri Lankans today – that there is a vast international conspiracy behind just about everything, doomsday scenarios included.

Still, the sense that some Twilight of the Gods is round the corner cannot be shaken off so easily. Every time a raw edgy chilly wind blows through the city at night I lie awake imagining that Ragnarök has come. Götterdämmerung could be the first thing on the agenda when the global populace of demigods (it’s us, dummy!) awakes tomorrow morning. Man – as both science (Homo sapiens) and scripture (created male and female in the image and likeness of God) know the race – may be on its way out of its place of origin and into the vast gulfs of the cosmic domain (by design or default). But a sword of Damocles hangs over their heads on humanity’s home planet. Global warming. Galloping disease and crime. Grim famine and war riding pale and palomino horses. Greedy people with dead consciences and flaming appetites eating their fellows out of life and liberty.
Through all of this, a dim hope persists. That around the time when the last fateful knell sounds and the ultimate death blow is about to fall, one greater than Odin will come. The older religions know it as an eschatological in-breaking of the Kingdom. Then things will no longer look to us like they do now. Things will begin to happen that are so great and beautiful that no mortal tongue can give voice to them. The term being over, the long – nay, eternal – holidays would have begun. The dream is finally ended: this may be the last hour before morning.




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