“Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general.”
The Day After the World Ended, notes for a speech at DeepSouthCon'79, New Orleans (21 July 1979), later published in It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)
Context: Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is "The Day After The World Ended". … I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as "Western Civilization" or "Modern Civilization", happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was "The World" for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all "ends of worlds". Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...
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R. A. Lafferty 109
American writer 1914–2002Related quotes
“Everything gets better in the end. If it's not better, it's not quite the end.”
Paulo Coelho
(1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist
Russell Jacoby
(1945) American historian
Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 4
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
Variants (Many of MLKs' speeches were delivered many times with slight variants): An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'
As quoted in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King, Second Edition (2011), Ch. "Community of Man", p. 3
1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”
Gabrielle Zevin
(1977) American writer
Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified”
Leon Trotsky
(1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia
Source: Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Context: A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified, From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.
Nick Land
(1962) British philosopher
"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011)
