(RIP Wisconsin Dells)
Did anyone read this essay by Iain McEwan, from a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian? I've just skimmed over it, but want to give it a good read sometime He seems to manage to express a very calm, thoughtful understanding of the appeal of apocalyptic thinking, locating it in a seemingly eternal place where the incomprehensibility of mortality, the fear of the unknown, and real danger meet:
In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality,
the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more
naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of
things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls
"fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we
imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What
could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own
personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes
with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end
of an era".
(McEwan includes a nice little methodological aside, in reference to polls about American religiosity that secular elites such as myself on both sides of the Atlantic titter over, like, as he puts it, "Atheist pornography":
It might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these
polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously - one poll's 90 per cent is
another's 53 per cent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained
by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a
clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the
literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely
to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than
of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at
various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.)
3 comments:
Yeah, I read it, too. I also thought it was good, although I don't really have anything else to add.
Mostly, I'm just really impressed that you opened a parenthetical in your own text and ended it inside a block quote. And then I think, well, what should he have done? Should he have left just the last parenthesis on a line after the quotation? Bad ass.
Ha ha, I struggled over that. I'm sure there's some sort of standard take on that, but I don't have any books on style.
Yeah, poll numbers shouldn't be used in any kind of writing without a reference at the very least, and hopefully a footnote with the exact wording of the question(s). I find it impossible to believe some of the numbers he cites, and was kind of irritated until I saw the caveats (two paragraphs later).
It also kind of irritating to see someone as bright of McEwan uncritically repeating the "wipe Israel off the face of the earth" mistranslation of Ahmadinejad.
Otherwise, great article.
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