The end of all things is a feeling we all know
It’s not the end of the world. So why does it feel like it? I don’t mean the feeling of those who have lost their livelihoods or the life of someone close to them. That is a hard thing. But there’s another feeling in the air.
In Virgil’s Aeneid there is a half-line that has moved the most different kinds of readers: Sunt lacrimae rerum. There are tears of things, or for things.
Aeneas speaks the words while on a journey with no known end, finding himself in Carthage, where his hope is raised by seeing the temple of Juno built there by Dido the queen. It bears scenes of the Trojan wars, of Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Priam and Achilles. He bids his companion Achates not to fear, since their history is depicted here, yet the tears run down his cheeks like a river.
The things for which there are tears, and the things which weep are the affairs of mankind. Soldiers know it well. “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,” said Wellington after his victory at Waterloo.
The classicist Enoch Powell embraced this pagan Roman doctrine: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Still the game goes on, because man is a competitive animal.
There’s a more poignant sense of ending, though, in the physical things around us. Today there is blossom on the bough, for it’s spring. Blossom falls. If that is sad, it is only our thinking it that makes it so. But the poignancy I mean is that the blossom will continue to bloom and fall when we are no longer there to see it.
I found that poignancy in this first week of serious reaction to the pandemic. The road sweeper swept each day as the flow of office workers on the pavements thinned. The dustcart came to empty the dustbins. Theatres are dark, museums closed. The churches stand open but no Mass or Evensong is said in public.
It’s like a country house closed until the family returns. The joint human activity that makes a city like a huge living creature has been suspended.
We know that feeling. It is like seeing the grass that grew in the High Street of Oxford during the long vacation. Would the human life return? That was a real fear in September 1665 when Samuel Pepys in London noted down: “But, Lord! what a sad time it is to see no boats upon the River and grass grows all up and down White Hall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets!”
That was during the plague, a much worse plague than ours, followed by the destruction of London by fire the next year and the defeat of England in war the next. So we’ve got nothing to complain of.
It’s just a feeling, a feeling of “the end of all things”. We know it at the end of a party, the end of term, the end of a career.
In the darkness of the Easter vigil, before the paschal candle is lit, the priest traces on it the letters alpha and omega, saying: “Christ, yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega. To him belongs all time and all the ages.”
The end is not just the point when time runs out. An end in view is what makes human intention a matter for praise or blame.
A happy ending may be what we find in a children’s story, but that’s because the myths of our shared culture became hand-me-downs for children.
Making a good end depends partly on what you bring. Some admirable people have a good life behind them. But those that come empty-handed can still realise that in the end it’s going to be all right.