The World Ends on Saturday Night

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Morning mist on Lake Mapourika, New Zealand: photo by Richard Palmer, 2004

As you may or may not have already heard, the world will be ending tomorrow at six, Pacific Daylight Time. I have this on good authority, having read an interview with Harold Camping, 89-year-old founder of Family Radio and Chief Engineer and Evangelist of The Idea That The World Ends Tomorrow.

How certain are you that world is going to end on May 21 — do you have any doubts?
God has given sooo much information in the Bible about this, and so many proofs, and so many signs, that we know it is absolutely going to happen without any question at all. There’s nothing in the Bible that God has ever prophesied — there’s many things that he prophesied would happen and they always have happened — but there’s nothing in the Bible that holds a candle to the amount of information to this tremendous truth of the end of the world. I would be absolutely in rebellion against God if I thought anything other than it is absolutely going to happen without any question.

Are you going to do something with all your money before the 21st? Are you going to donate it to charity or something?
What’s the point? In other words, Judgment Day is the end of the world. That means that the whole world is in judgment, it will not be business as usual at all. At all. Nothing that goes on is important any longer...

Harold Camping, from an interview in New York Magazine: Daily Intel, 11 May 2011

Billboard, California, 61 days before predicted end of the world: photo by Lord Jim, 8 March 2011

And I walked on down the hall -- Jim Morrison, The End, 1966

Family Radio advertisement for approaching Judgment Day: USA Today, Friday 13 May 2011

Reeling out into the rushing bedlam of the freeway feeder, after reading the words of Harold Camping, one wondered if the frenzied speed of the commuter traffic could be explained by the drivers wanting to get home a little early, to pack up. But no, it's like that every day, said a frail inner voice of reason.

In the quieter side streets reflection was possible.

It was this bit, in the course of Mr. Camping's helpful exposition of the trajectory of incipient calamity, that had so occupied one -- a remarkable promise really:

Are you going to do something with all your money before the 21st? Are you going to donate it to charity or something?
What’s the point? In other words, Judgment Day is the end of the world. That means that the whole world is in judgment, it will not be business as usual at all. At all. Nothing that goes on is important any longer..

Passing along a low stone barrier surmounted by a steep hillside ascended by a winding flagstone path leading up to a large and well-kept house, reflection was interrupted. There atop the stone barrier lay an elaborate and intricate-looking and obviously very expensive camera, with its custom leather carrying-strap. Well, this was carrying things a bit far. Could it really be the case that, assuming an imminent termination of the value of all worldly possessions --

it will not be business as usual at all. At all. Nothing that goes on is important any longer...

-- the residents had actually abandoned their beautiful camera? What use would it serve in the after life, after all? Next to the camera lay a pair of glasses. Thick lenses, rimless, probably bifocals. Who would need their bifocals on Judgment Day?

Still, there were some jagged edges to this piece of the puzzle, and these spurred the resolute neighbourly Good Samaritanism in one to emerge from its Loch Ness depths and slowly, in fact tortuously, what with the gamy leg, ascend those flagstone steps, so as to inform the residents that, just on the off-chance they did not expect to be rapt away withing thirty-six hours, they might wish to retrieve their camera and glasses.

The expedition up the hillside took a while. Halfway up, it became possible to see through the front windows into a living room in which were visible a man and woman of approximately middle age, talking and laughing. Before them were music stands on which were propped sheet music. Music was playing behind them, from an unseen source.

Waving to get their attention proved unsuccessful at first, but then the woman appeared to take notice of the strange old person hailing her from halfway up her arduous front steps. She said something to the man. The man appeared to raise a cellphone toward his face. Meanwhile the woman came to the front door, opened it a crack, and said: Stop right there!

Or it might have been: Halt right where you are!

At such moments, after a bit of a climb, the dizzying effects of the blood pressure meds tend to overwhelm one's cerebration. The recording memory temporarily founders, much as might a small vessel at sea in the brunt of a Huge Wave, the Great Wave that will herald The Coming of the End of the World, on Saturday night at six o'clock.

"Sorry to bother you, but did you leave your camera and glasses down on that wall?"

The woman turned to her companion.

Of course they immediately became much more neighbourly at that point, and the fellow came down to fetch his camera and glasses. He seemed happy to have recovered his belongings and not at all concerned about the imminent end of the world.

One went on one's sorry way.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

...........-- T.S. Eliot: The Hollow Men, 1925

Passing Safeway, there was a sighting of Robert Reich. He was walking in the opposite direction, crossing at the light, with a slightly younger person of congenial appearance. They were talking in a what seemed a calm and civil way.

Like the lost camera episode, that brief glimpse of a stranger proved curiously relieving. If the end of the world were imminent, wouldn't Robert Reich know? And if he knew, would he be seeming so calm and collected?

Who can say, though, that the sure and certain knowledge of the imminent end of the world, provided it's accompanied by the equally sure and certain knowledge that the end will be not too painful and the climax clean and mercifully quick, might not be a very soothing thing, at this stage.

Not to go on overlong with this inconsequential saga. Later on in the chilly evening, another your-reporter-on-the-street encounter, another stranger, and then another... Let us skip the circumstantial detail and race on toward the terminus. Indeed wasn't that the subject here?

Two bored college work study students, engaged in folding some towels, said they wouldn't mind if the world ended, but would prefer it didn't happen until the end of the weekend. "That way I get out of my Monday shift," one helpfully elaborated. "Plus we get to keep Saturday night, yo," added the other.

And then there was a handsome and powerfully built young man in a Detroit City tee shirt who seemed bemused by the matter.

"I will tell you a story," he said. "I come from Panama. In 1989 I was seventeen years old and living in a dormitory in a military academy. In the middle of the night everybody woke up, there were explosions everywhere, nobody knew what was going on. We were told to go into a bunker. We stayed in that bunker four nights without knowing what was going on. Then we found out the U.S. had invaded.

"We had thought it was the end of the world."

Staudammkrone dam at Lüner Lake, Austria: photo by Friedrich Böhringer, 2010