APOCALYPSE
341
future, rather than from our confidence in the uniqueness of our
crisis, that the character of our apocalypse must be known.
I leave aside bogus apocalypse, and also demotic apocalypse,
though it still flourishes-and attend to more serious examples of the
pattern.
It
is a pattern of anxiety that we shall find recurring, with
interesting differences, in different stages of modernism. Its recurrence
is a feature of our cultural tradition, if not ultimately of our physiol–
ogy, for in some measure our ways of thinking and feeling about our
position "in the middest," and our historical position, always at the
end of an epoch, are determined. "It
is
a peculiarity of the imagina–
tion that it is always at the end of an era." We make sense of the
past as of a book or a psalm we have read or recited, and of the
present as a book the seals of which we shall see opened; the only
way to do this is to project fears and guesses and inferences from the
past on to the future. St. Augustine described the condition in his
Confessions.
The moments we call crises are ends and beginnings. We
are ready, therefore, to accept all manner of evidence that ours
is
a
genuine end, a genuine beginning. We accept it, for instance, from
the calendar.
Our sense of epoch is gratified above
all
by the ends of centuries.
Sometimes, indeed, it appears that we induce events to occur in
accordance with this secular habit of mind. The year 1000 is typical;
but I suppose for most of us the best known outbreak of
fin-de-siecle
phenomena occurred at the end of the nineteenth century; at any
rate, it was in that century that the expression became current. Cer–
tainly there was a deal of apocalyptic feeling at that time, not least
in the revival of Imperial mythologies both in England and Ger–
many, in the "decadence" which became a literary category, and
which produced Nordau's book ("it is as though the morrow could
not link itself with today. Things as they are totter and plunge"), in
the utopian renovationism of some political sects and the anarchism
of others. This large and interesting subject I must here forego, ex–
cept to maintain that the whole concurrence of
fin-de-siecle
pheno–
mena amply illustrates Focillon's thesis, that we project our existential
anxieties on to history; there is a real correlation between the ends
of centuries and the peculiarity of our imagination, that it chooses
always to be at the end of an era.
