Imagining the Apocalypse
Predictions of the End Times run through the Old Testament, and maybe Noah's flood could be seen as a mini-preview of the big and final apocalypse. Efforts to imagine the end, or to create metaphors for the end, run through literature, song and art, but none are as familiar as the visions that St. John experienced in his cave on Patmos and are captured in the mystical Revelations, the final book of the New Testament. Alan Jacobs, in Touchstone, discusses some literary depictions of Apocalypse and concludes that it is "inexpressible." A sample from his piece, this bit on the Narnia series:
In The Last Battle, the conclusion to the Narnia series, C. S. Lewis has Aslan bring the chronicle of Narnia itself to a close. “All the stars were falling,” he writes. “Aslan had called them home.” Soon thereafter, Aslan commands the Time-giant to “make an end”; the Giant extends his arm and crushes all light from the sun; Peter, the High King, closes and locks the great Door; and Narnia is no more.
The children and their friends live now and always in Aslan’s country, and for a few pages—pages that are not, I believe, among the more successful in the stories—Lewis sketches for us what Aslan’s country is like. But it can be only a sketch. Aslan utters his famous final words: “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” And then the final paragraph:
And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter 1 of the Great Story, which no one on earth has ever read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Read the entire here: Click here: Touchstone Archives: The Inexpressible Apocalypse . Listening to Dylan, on a bootleg - I mean an "audience recording" - If Dogs Run Free
