16 August 2018

—a playlist accompanying my English composition class “Total Eclipse of the Heart: Apocalyptic Fiction”

The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. It can also absorb changing interests, rival apocalypses, such as the Sibylline writings. It is patient of change and of historiographical sophistications. It allows itself to be diffused, blended with other varieties of fiction—tragedy, for example, myths of Empire and of Decadence—and yet it can survive in very naive forms. Probably the most sophisticated of us is capable at times of naive reactions to the End.



—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending