Australia and Apocalypse

In this last of meeting places,

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on the beach of the tumid river.

T.S. Eliot

The Hollow Men

Australia and the Apocalypse

“Tumid” means swelling”

I first ran across T.S. Eliot in college. The one of the two lines that stuck in my mind from his entire body of work was from The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” In my manuscript now approaching the end, I am working on the penultimate Chapter 17: The Apocalypse of Selfishness.” I include that line from T.S. Elliot.

At this moment I am attending to case studies of conditions that either are apocalyptic or will soon be. I chose for one case study Australia which is an ideal example of what I am writing about. This morning, I recalled a movie I saw in 1961 at Fort Hood Texas while on active duty with the Second Armored Division. It was “On The Beach,” It was adopted from a novel of the same name by Nevil Shute and it concerned human life be gradually extinguished by radiation from a nuclear war. Truly apocalyptic. The only known survivors were in Australia but doom is creeping in on them.

I had never read Nevil Shute’s novel but I thought I would take a look at it on Kindle. I was dumbstruck (don’t some of you probably wish) by the opening page. It was a two quotations from The Hollow Men including “This is the way the word ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”  “Tumid” was in the first quotation and  I had to look it up.

Teilhard wrote of the noosphere, as collecting and preserving human knowledge. Carl Jung had a related concept: the collective subconscious. Marshal McLuhan, who I have been told was inspired by Teilhard, wrote of the “global village.” Sometimes I think that existence is like a shaggy woolen sweater: tug on one loose thread and the entire sweater unravels. Not exactly an elegant metaphor like the “global village” but it’s mine.

I am winding up my Austraila case study this morning. I have already completed Bangladesh. On to Indonesia, palm oil and the methane time bomb.

(I can establish the exact date of when I saw the movie because I was walking around the Company area whistling “Waltzing Matilda” and Bud McGraw the Company commander said: “I know what movie you saw this weekend.” About two months later I transferred from Armor to JAG. It was an automatic promotion to First Lieutenant and instead of following the Second Armored to Ft. Polk Louisiana, I got ten weeks of JAG School in Virginia in the spring. Now back to work.)