Jan 08 2009
The End of the World, Part I
The Anchoress has posted mortality rants. It’s a very Irish thing, I sometimes think.
Elizabeth Scalia, aka The Anchoress, was writing about pessimistic comments about society changing, not for the better. Senator Ted Kennedy told some friends that when they became his age, ”the whole thing is going to fall apart”. And Roger Ebert, he of movie criticism fame, recently opined that politicians must work together because “It’s all coming to pieces”.
I was enjoying a cup of tea while I read. I began to post a short response, but it grew. That happens a lot lately. Sheesh - reading The Anchoress is turning into homework. And my tea is cold.
Anyway, Sen. Kennedy’s “the whole thing is going to fall apart” and Ebert’s “It’s all coming to pieces” are nothing more than mortality rants.
Men and women both have them, but I think maybe women start earlier.* They come when a person starts looking back at the great days and perceives that few of those days lie ahead. Vain women complain, for example, about the unfairness of aging or the birthday with a zero in it.
Self-important men worry about leaving a legacy that will stand for all time and, as they see more years behind them and watch all the young men coming forward, it galls them. One of my uncles (not a Kennedy) was quite the philosopher when he was in his bottle. I got the feeling that “The world is going to hell” was a favorite theme and, as he was not a God-fearing man, it wasn’t a religious sermon. It was more pragmatic.
He was a construction worker and very proud of his work. He mentioned once (and only once) that one of his buildings had been torn down to make way for “a big box”. His face took on an expression that I’d never seen before (or since).
Kennedy and Ebert are looking back at more years than they have ahead of them. The senator especially may wonder if he’s made a lasting legacy or if everything will be “destroyed” (by conservatives?) It’s only natural. It’s bad enough when one’s strength flags and one’s ideas turn to familiar routines, but it’s compounded by seeing the eager young men with strange new ideas and (perhaps diametrically-opposed)values.
That doesn’t mean the world will fall apart when the senator is gone.
Leonard Wibberley, one of my favorite Irish-American writers, knew about mortality rants. In Stranger at Killknock, he puts these words in one of his characters, a fisherman:
It is a true thing that the world was born with me and it will die with me. It did not exist for me before I opened my eyes and it will go forever the day I shut them for the last time. It is my world. I created it when I was born and I will destroy it when I die. Sorrow for the world then, the day I draw my last breath.
I think he’s being Irish. I imagine that the world will go on, but differently. Things will eventually go to hell – in the Biblical sense, in the natural sense as our sun dies, etc.
*I had my midlife crisis at 20, just to get it out of the way.
This is so interesting.
You’ve given me a new term and new little something to think over.
What is my mortality rant?
I know I have one in me.
I just need to let it go.
I’ll get back to you when it bubbles forth.
You do that! And don’t be surprised if it bubbles up more than once.
[...] Peggy Noonan has discovered that people are anxious about the economic crisis. More people are going to church; city folks are looking for farms. Gun sales are up; some deep-pocketed persons are pulling large sums of cash from their banks. (Or perhaps, being of Irish descent, Noonan is merely on a mortality rant.) [...]