The End of Everything

“For eternity a minute is equal to a century, for infinity the atom is equal to the nebula. But I am floating neither in infinity nor in eternity; I am situated in a world that my presence defines.”
— Simone de Beauvoir

Part 1: The Fire and The Comet

The Fire

Humphrey Smith, a Quaker priest routinely arrested for his non-Protestant teachings, had a vision of an apocalyptic scene. He saw God's fury let loose in the city of London, punishing it for its sins. “The fire consumed all foundations which the City stood upon,” he wrote. “For the burning was of God, and could never be quenched nor overcome.” Humphrey knew that the foundations of his world were not permanent. They can and will be destroyed in due time. In the decade prior, the people of England saw the end of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and with it the execution of King Charles I. The first break England had from the monarchy. It did not last long. The same year Humphrey made his prediction of a fire in London, King Charles II reclaimed the crown his father lost. The world felt unstable. Many feared what was ahead of them and rightfully so.

A comet would fly over London five years later. A dark omen warning all willing to listen. With it, the comet brought plague to the city. Over the course of the following year, the Great Plague would go on to kill a quarter of the city's population. And still residents believed the worst was to come. For many, it was. There was fear in the streets that pushed many into church pews. Next year there would not just be plague but war and, as Humphrey Smith predicted, fire. The same year as Humphrey’s vision, a writer predicted that the “Egge of Antichristianisme” would hatch. The writer only signed “Friend of the Truth” but their prediction was less ambiguous. The world was about to end and it would happen in the year of the Devil: 1666.

The growing plague, the comet, the war, the fall and rise of the monarchy - all coalescing around the number of the Beast. People were scared and with good reason. If the end was coming, it would happen now. Even the recently crowned king would flee the City of London in fear. Outside the city, a farmer was unsettled while collecting his hen’s eggs. One egg, freshly laid by his hen, had the words “Christ is Coming” inscribed on it. He watched his prophet hen as it laid another egg with another warning. Crowds formed to see the prophetic eggs for themselves. Townsfolk began wearing seals with Christ’s initials in hopes of securing a place in heaven. The “Egge of Antichristianisme” prediction had come true.

Still in the city, Thomas Farriner noticed a small fire in his baker's shop on Pudding Lane. Thomas believed he put the fire out when he went to sleep. In the middle of the night, it consumed his home. It then grew into the neighboring houses, then neighboring streets, eventually reaching the River Thames in the south, devastating everything in its path. Thousands of homes were devoured. The fire spilled outside of the western portion of the London Wall. It burned for days. The city went up in “a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire.” as Samuel Pepys recalled in his journal. The vision and the prediction were correct. Plague, war, and flames worked together to collapse the city. The world was ending.

The Comet

A few hundred years after a comet beaconed the apocalypse in London, another comet would spell the end for the rest of the world. Camille Flammarion published an article in a newspaper in France with warnings of the impending arrival from Halley's Comet. Humankind would be given one last beautiful show and then “the human race would perish in a paroxysm of joy and delirium”. Once in a human lifetime, Halley’s Comet pays the world a visit. After this one, thought the masses, there will not be a next human lifetime for it to return to. Unlike previous passes, this time it's “going to wrap its tail around the earth”, strangling it.

It was discovered that the tail contained a deadly cyanogen gas. “A grain of its potassium salt touched to the tongue is enough to cause instant death”, Camille said, “all human life on our planet will then be snuffed out.” Another French astronomer speculated on the effects of the tail's X-rays, suggesting it could cause all the atmosphere's water to condense at once. This would lead to worldwide floods reminiscent of the biblical cleansing. Over in the Americas, the New York Times would publish an article headlined “Comet's Poisonous Tail.” In Korea, Lee Pongnai, a former high ranking member of the Korean government, fled the country knowing the comet was "a sign foretelling the downfall of the present imperial dynasty of Korea."

Panic spread wide and ran deep. People prepared for the end in every way they could. Some threw parties, others prepared for the worst. Many creditors stopped paying bank loans. That year many German farmers did not plant their crops. Some farmers in the United States sold their land. The apocalypse was real and it was here. Many turned to curative pills and elixirs that promised to negate the effects of the tail. People tried sealing off their homes from the outside, covering the keyholes that the toxic gas might seep through. Fernando Colón-Vásquez traveled miles from his home in Puerto Rico to a cave. He crawled deep into it on his hands and knees for as far deep as he could go to escape what the comet might bring. The night of the comet's arrival, a group of three-hundred people outside of Atlanta also sought refuge in a cave. They prayed into the night, expecting morning to never come. In a nearby prison, a level of the prison had its population confirmed by a local Bishop in anticipation of the end.

Reports of suicide emerged from multiple countries. France experienced a flood that devastated areas around the Seine river. “This was the way it was in the scriptures,” said Geralda Martin, who was eight and at the time, “they all talked about the world coming to an end.”

Part 2: The King and the Student

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson, “and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.” Eight years after those words were published in The Proud Highway, Hunter S. Thompson took his own life while on the phone with his spouse, Anita Thompson. Anita was away but their son, daughter and grandson were in the house with him. “He wanted to leave on top of his game,” Anita told the Seattle Times, “I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision. It was a problem for us.” No great fire. No poisonous comet. Just a past tense, “Hunter.”

Many criticized the cliche expression, “everyone dies alone.” Professor Shelly Kagan at Yale has done so in a lecture series since made public. Shelly claims the phrase is useless in gaining a true and useful understanding of the nature of death. “It might be very important and insightful but you're not saying anything especially interesting about death when you say everyone dies alone, if it's also true that everyone eats their lunch alone.” However, it is the “born alone” and the “we are all alone” that are usually just implied, made clear by Hunter, that are important. The importance of death is the life just before it. Death does not give our life meaning. Life gives our death meaning. Perhaps, “everyone dies alone” is trying to help us understand “everyone lives alone” but it is not until death that we look back on our life and realize we were alone the whole way.

The King

In the Theravāda tradition of Buddhism, there is a teaching called The Simile of the Mountains where the Buddha is approached by a great king and sits to his side to talk. The Buddha proposes a scenario for the Kings to consider: a trustworthy and reliable man approaches the king with terrible news. A great mountain from the east, as high as the clouds, is moving through the lands. It is crushing everything in its path and is headed to where the two stand. As soon as the king hears this news another trustworthy and reliable man from the south approaches with similar news. This time a mountain is moving in from the south. Then a third reliable man from the north and then fourth from the west.

The situation is clear to the king. There are mountains destroying everything in their path closing in on him and his people. There is no way around them or escaping the situation, he is assured by the men. The Buddha then asks what the King would do in such a scenario. The King responded saying there was not much to do but right conduct, skillful deeds, and supporting those around him.

The Buddha then reminded the king that there are mountains closing in on him and everyone he rules: that of aging, sickness, and death. The Buddha then asks what the King will do.

The Student

In Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre tells a story about a moral dilemma one of his students faced. Possibly the most important decision he will make, possibly the last decision he will make. His older brother had died in battle in 1940. He yearned to avenge his death. His mother, however, was living alone with him. She was “deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man.” The young man had to decide if he should stay and help with his mother at home or if he should go to England and join the Free French Forces. In one option, he would have a meaningful impact on his mother's life but it would stop there. In the other he would fight for something bigger than himself that could change the world.

As Jean-Paul described it, “he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous - and it might be frustrated on the way.” These modes represented different responsibilities. In one, he had a responsibility to his mother. In another, he had a responsibility to the world and to fight against the spread of Nazism and to avenge his brother. In either case, he will have to deal with the consequences of his decision. If he leaves, his mother will spend her days alone and possibly lose her last son. If he stays, he will have the weight of the many men, just like his brother, dying in a noble fight and giving up everything for a cause bigger than themselves.

The decision seemed impossible. No doctrine could save him either. “Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live?” He could seek council from a priest if he wanted to stick to Christian morals. At the time, however, there were priests in favor of waiting for the war to end and priests who sympathized with the resistance. By picking which priest to go to, he would be making the decision for himself. Perhaps he may even decide without realizing he was the one making the decision. Letting the priest's words guide him but choosing which words he decided to hear.

In fact, that is what the young man does but he does not seek a priest's advice. He speaks to his professor, Jean-Paul Sartre. The young man tells him “In the end, it is feeling that counts; the direction in which it is really pushing me is the one I ought to choose.” His teacher, however, cannot know or measure how he feels. Jean-Paul tells his pupil, “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent.”

In the Simile of the Mountains, Lord Buddha starts with a hypothetical about the fall of everything the King knows. Maybe there is a world that continues outside the destruction of his Kingdom, everyone he knows, and the immediate surroundings but it would not be the world the King knows. For the King, the world would have ended. Then the Buddha narrows the King's world even further; the King's world is only his experience of the world he sees. If the world ended the day after he died, the experience would be the same to him. In making the King answer what he would do in an apocalypse before asking what he would do when confronted with death made him reevaluate what it means to live.

Jean-Paul's story deals with the very next step. You are aware of the importance of how you live your life, how can you choose? Jean-Paul's answer is, simply, choose. He is not stressing the futility of the choice, quite the opposite. He is highlighting the freedom one has. There is no correct choice, there is just the one we make. It is a dizzying amount of freedom but freedom we must exercise.

Even as he recounts the story, Jean-Paul refuses to tell the audience what the student's choice was. That omission doubles down on the message - only the individual can decide what is right for them. If we knew what the student's choice was, we might infer that it was the correct one. We may try to outsource our decision to avoid making it but even that is a façade. If the student asked the priest, he knew what the priest would tell him and chose to ask him. Accepting the choice of someone else or even avoiding making a choice would be a choice in itself. Even in asking his professor, he is trying to live in good faith but find relief from the weight of his freedom. Jean-Paul recognized this and offered no relief.

Part 3: Aftermath

While we do not know, and in fact likely will never know, whether or not Jean-Paul's student joined the military. We do know that Fernando Colón-Vásquez, the young boy who hid in a cave in Puerto Rico to escape the comet, did. He, of course, did not die from the comet's tail in 1910 and not because of the cave's safety. Halley's comet passed without causing destruction, outside those caused by the panic fearing that it would. The toxic tail of the comet that incited the panic, in fact, did not pass through the earth at all. If it had, it would likely have dispersed into the upper atmosphere harmlessly.

Fernando was 15 when he entered the cave. He drew a picture of a comet passing over a church on the wall, the only reason we found out anyone was hiding there at all. His brother Monserate drew a similar image. It is believed his entire family hid together in the cave from assumed deviation. Fernando was a well educated, bilingual, boy living on his town's main street. That street was a two hour hike through “an arid landscape of thorny plants” from the cave. He had 4 siblings, including Monserate. It is unknown how long his family hid in the cave before leaving or if other families were with them. Fernando did, eventually, leave and continued to live his life. He would go into specialized work, leveraging his family's emphasis on education. Eventually going on to join the military and then working at a State Insurance Fund. This is almost everything we know about Fernando and his life.

While the world did not end in 1910, and indeed in 1666, Fornando’s world would come to an end in 1950, at the age of 54. No one on record born before 1910 is alive today. The fear that everyone would die from the comet was misplaced. They did, in fact, all die, just alone. “This is the way the world ends” writes T.S. Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” The fear of the world ending was not about the world or the comet. Far worse than dying in a world ending event, is dying alone. If the world ended all at once, just maybe you could escape the banality of your own mortality.

It goes without saying that the Londoners of 1666 are all gone now as well. Eventually the monarchy lost power, the war became a piece of history, and they rebuilt from the fire. It is often cited that less than ten people died from the fire. Thomas Farriner's maid, whose name remains unknown, was the first to die in the fire. While Thomas, his daughter, and a manservant were able to escape, she was not. An elderly shoemaker was also killed in the fire. We do have records of his name; Paul Lowell. Richard Yrde is the only other known name of those who died in the fire. Richard died in the St Mary Woolnoth church.

The real effects of the Great Fire were more mundane but no less tragic. The fire burned for days, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Not included in the death toll is James Shirley, a famous poet and playwright living in the city at the time, and Frances Blackburne, James' wife. They fled to a fire refugee camp together and died there of hypothermia. Thirteen years earlier, James ended his poem Death's Subtle Ways:

Devouring Famine, Plague, and War,
Each able to undu mankind,
Death's servile emissaries are;
Nor to these alone confined,
He hath at will
More quaint and subtle ways to kill;
A smile or kiss, as he will use the art,
Shall have the cunning skill to break a heart.

Part 4: Consultations

We know the world did not end while Fernando was hiding in a cave, scribbling on the walls, or when James Shirley sought refuge in a makeshift camp. Still, the world Fernando and James knew is gone. It left with them. We can only tell ourselves stories about their world now. Perhaps the world will end, just not at the same time. A billion worlds flickering in and out until there's no more light.

Of course, the mountains are closing in. It is this exact situation, however, that allows us to find meaning. We don't discover meaning, we create it. That is to say, we invent it. If it were given to us freely, we might struggle to recognize its importance and each world we encompass would be interchangeable. Instead, only I can create my meaning, no one can make it for me. I can choose, like a student asking his priest, to allow someone else to tell me what it ought to be and I can choose to follow their answer but it is still me deciding. I imagine Fernando looking at the night sky after exiting the cave and seeing Orion, his belt made of the first gleam of light he had seen in days. James, hundreds of years earlier and half way across the world, also would have been able to see Orion in that harsh winter from his camp. Maybe he saw the hunter fighting for life as nature fought back. When I see the dim stars through city lights, I know I may be looking at the same thing Humphrey Smith, Thomas Farriner, Hunter S. Thompson, and billions of others have seen but only I can decide what to make of it.

The world might not end but yours will. You can spend your life denying it and finding something bigger than yourself but you eventually have to accept you are big enough. You don't need to live in the end times to find purpose, the purpose can only come from you and can be found anywhere you can look for it.

Death is only meaningful because it represents the end of a life. Our lives create that meaning. And, as Annie Dillard tells us, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Our world will end, free of the suffocating tail of Halley's Comet or the bloody flame of London's Great Fire, and it will happen alone. The world might watch but it will continue without us. Despite that, every person lives their lives and finds meaning. They do so because they have no other choice. The universe will tell you there is no meaning to find and you will find it anyway - for the stars only align when you look for constellations.