beginning of time. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. 271 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Matthew Fike, PhD Whether it is thought that the world will end with extreme weather, as R. Frost (1969) imagines in “Fire and Ice,” or “not with a bang but a whimper,” as T. S. Eliot (1973) proposes in “The Hollow Men,” both poems illustrate the fact that end-of-world thinking pervades the collective consciousness. Figuring out why and what to do about it is the subject of The Myth of the Great Ending: Why We’ve Been Longing for the End of Days Since the Beginning of Time, in which J. M. Felser (2011) synthesizes insights from philosophy, mythology, psychology, and the
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new physics into “a useful analysis of a contagion” (p. 3) whose origin in America dates back to William Miller’s prophecy that the world would end on October 22, 1844, but whose provenance lies shrouded in prehistory. What is clear, however, is that the end of the world is not an upcoming historical event but rather a myth that points us toward the possibility of greater self-knowledge and wholeness. Those who subscribe to a literal interpretation, Felser insisted, consume “junk food for the imagination . . . a deadly poison circulating in the body of human consciousness” (p. 196). He urges, as an antidote and alternative, that readers embrace the world of nature around us and our own inner nature, the unconscious. At the heart of the Myth of the Great Ending lies the concept of linear time versus time as circular, a distinction that is present in the plays of W. Shakespeare, whose language provides an apt starting point. Prospero’s phrase in The Tempest, “the dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50; qtd. in Bevington, 1992, p. 1531), bodies forth linear time in which the past is distant, whereas Feste’s phrase in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, “the whirligig of time” (5.1.376; qtd. in Bevington, p. 361), conveys not only the cycle of life, but perhaps also the unity of all action. That is, time is a loop
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.