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
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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.
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