A Short Inquiry into the End of the World

A cohesive, insistent, and passionate reading of our present moment--not so much of the end (one dares to hope!) but as an end or, rather, a crisis, itself a term that comes from the Greek word for "to separate" as well as "to analyze" or "to judge." The present crisis, in all its perceivable uniqueness, is connected, Mister Investigator discovers, to multiple precedents-various events where despair seemed to be the only thinkable response to catastrophe. Stromberg's analysis is first...
More Description

A cohesive, insistent, and passionate reading of our present moment--not so much of the end (one dares to hope!) but as an end or, rather, a crisis, itself a term that comes from the Greek word for "to separate" as well as "to analyze" or "to judge." The present crisis, in all its perceivable uniqueness, is connected, Mister Investigator discovers, to multiple precedents-various events where despair seemed to be the only thinkable response to catastrophe. Stromberg's analysis is first and foremost a reading: he brings in the significant attempts of various thinkers, including poets, artists, philosophers, and politicians, to react to the unthinkable-that is, to think it. He is most committed to those thinkers who managed to hold their despair close to home, or "not to lose it"-a phrase allegedly uttered to Anna Akhmatova by her then husband, the brilliant and acerbic art historian Nikolai Punin, whose advice has since become entrenched in the history of the Soviet century, which has had its own array of terrors. In Mister Investigator's case, it is the likes of W. H. Auden who chose to look at the fateful events of 1939 with full awareness. This ability and desire to look closely at events that invoke horror is what makes Stromberg's text so attractive-and more to the point, so necessary today.