encompassing past, present, and future, much as all points on the circumference of a circle are equidistant from the center (perhaps a missed analogy to Focus 15, in which all time periods are available, much as spokes emanate outward from the central hub of a bicycle wheel). Although Felser did not include the bard’s terminology, he did mention King Lear’s “own great ending, which serves as a handy escape-hatch from the suffering of which he himself is the principal author” (p. 39). It would have been helpful to note, in addition, these questions—Kent’s “Is this the promised end?” and Edgar’s “Or image of that horror?” (5.3.268−69; qtd. in Bevington, p. 1217)—regarding Lear’s death. Here is a perfect illustration of one of the theories that Felser debunks: the idea that the death of individual persons in the medium of linear time accounts for the Myth of the Great Ending. There is a similar missed opportunity in the mention of W. B. Yeats’s (1973) “The Second Coming,” whose line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” Felser reads as Yeats’s “own take on the Great Ending” (p. 38). More precisely, however, the phrase “widening gyre” earlier in the poem expressed Yeats’s idea that history is cyclical—not a whirligig or a circle but a series of interlocking 2,000- year cones; and he probably took grim satisfaction in knowing that, though his own death was imminent, the world as he knew it was ending along with him.
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TMI Journal 2012 No. 1 · 1 TMI Journal 2012 No. 1.pdf
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The Myth of the Great Ending obviously bears strong relation to the concept of linear time; but a personal death like Lear’s, extrapolated to a global scale, does not explain it. Something else must account for the shift from time as circular to time as linear, and Felser considers several alternative theories. One possibility is Zoroastrianism’s pattern of creation, fall, and atonement, which Aristotle secularized into the theory that a tragedy must have a beginning, middle, and end. Felser’s treatment of the Poetics would be more effective if he had noted that it also stated that a tragedy is “an imitation . . . of a complete action” that should take place within “a single revolution of the sun” (Aristotle, trans. 1961). Whether or not Aristotle secularized Zoroaster, the theatrical use of beginning, middle, and end fostered verisimilitude Next Page 12 TMI JOURNAL 2012 and may have arisen from simple practicality. Another possibility that Felser has considered is Joseph Campbell’s “Great Reversal,” a transformation in which the circle, a symbol of joy and harmony with inner and outer nature, becomes linked to destruction through the image of chariot wheels. But Felser has suggested a more fundamental
cause than technology, Zoroaster, or Aristotle—namely, the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, which sparked human beings’ exile from nature. Thus “the Myth of the Great Ending . . . is but the psychological residue of the unresolved trauma left by our creation of linear civilization and our rejection of nature’s circular rhythms” (p. 77). Over the last 2,000 years, religious and secular belief systems have developed to shore up our species’ separation from nature. Felser mentioned St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Jerry Falwell as proponents of the religious idea that the human mind and imagination are fallen and untrustworthy, and secular writers like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Carl Sagan as advocates of reason, knowledge-as-power, and the denial of intuitive/unconscious resources. The key religious observation—that human consciousness is imperfect and untrustworthy because of the Fall—led to the most beautiful sentence in the entire book: “We are mental and moral prisoners of sin, captivated by bizarre fun- house mirrors of self-deception in a charnel house of terror and lies” (p. 107). Unfortunately, in addressing the way in which religion and science challenge nature, Felser painted with too broad a brush in stating, “All our mainstream religions and philosophies are rusty, worn-out buckets. They are outdated containers of antiquated ideas about reality.