Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.
— Achilles
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
— Lord Byron, Darkness
I want Death to find me planting my cabbages.
— Michel de Montaigne
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
— C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians
It is written: ‘It is not good for man to be alone!’ But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but the only natural and proper, condition; so much so, that any other arrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbably, wild, and far-fetched unreality, like the utopian schemes of dreamers and faddists. That the whole world should have been made for me alone – that London should have been built only in order that I might enjoy the vast heroic spectacle of its burning – that all history, and all civilisation should have existed only in order to accumulate for my pleasures its inventions and facilities, its stores of purple and wine, of spices and gold – no more extraordinary does it all seem to me than to some little unreflecting Duke of my former days seemed the possessing of lands which remote forefathers seized, and slew the occupiers: nor, in reality, is it even so extraordinary, I being alone.
— M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud
Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heißt. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als wäre er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind ausgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muß so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm.
— Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte
“Ah! If only it had been an earthquake! A good shake and that’s it… One counts the dead, one counts the living and the whole thing’s over and done with. But this rotten bastard of a disease! Even those who don’t have it carry it in their hearts.”
— Albert Camus, The Plague
That the boffins would come through with the complete answer one day was not to be doubted – and, always, it might be to-morrow.
From what I had been hearing, the general faith in boffins was now somewhat greater than the boffins’ faith in themselves. Their shortcomings as saviours were beginning to oppress them.
— John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death –
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.
— Philip Larkin, Wants
HAMM: (Violently.) Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!
…
CLOV: I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.
— Samuel Beckett, Endgame
“You know how I know it’s the end of the world? Because everything’s already been done. Every music’s been tried. Every government. Every hairstyle. Every bubblegum. Every breakfast cereal. It’s over. We used it all up.”
— Kathryn Bigelow — Strange Days
By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/social/economic complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse