History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
— Joyce (Ulysses, 42)
And when we do wake up, and the curtain falls on all the struts and frets we call history, what does this mess finally mean?
The gods did this, and spun the destruction of peoples, for the sake of the singing of people hereafter.
— Odyssey, VIII
One day, in all probability, there will be no people to sing. Why not sing now then? For all you know, your chance may be the last.
Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.
— 1 Corinthians 10.11
This, the time you are living, is the end of history. This is where it was all heading: that you should see it now like the moon in a dewdrop. The responsibility to make some sense of it can’t be passed off to eternal or future beings. For them as for you, it will not be the future when they live the time. Even in contemplation, making sense takes time – time and a body. The readiness is all, the readiness to read the signs; and the readings are signs again. Even the Book of Revelation was and is a reading.
We have noted that the last book in the Bible, the one explicitly called Revelation or Apocalypse, is a mosaic of allusions to the Old Testament … What the seer in Patmos had a vision of was primarily, as he conceived it, the true meaning of the Scriptures, and his dragons and horsemen and dissolving cosmos were what he saw in Ezekiel and Zechariah, whatever or however he saw on Patmos. … For him all these incredible wonders are the inner meaning or, more accurately, the inner form of everything that is happening now. Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
— Northrop Frye (1982, 135-6)
The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.
— Frye (1982, 138)
The mind that has been authentically transmitted is: one mind is all things, all things are one mind.
Thus, an ancient teacher said, “If you realize this mind, there is not an inch of land left on earth.”
Know that when you realize this mind, the entire sky collapses and the whole earth explodes. Or, if you realize this mind, the earth raises its surface by three inches.— Dogen, SBGZ ‘Sokushin zebutsu’ (Tanahashi 2010, 46)