The word apocalypse

The words change: a car, a little over a century ago, had horses in front of it, a basin was a fountain, a pilot a sailor, a king a fool who ruled, a grandmother a woman of 60. There are very few words that mean always the same: a good part of its charm lies in those changes. But perhaps few have changed as much as the apocalypse.

The word apocalypse It’s pure confusion. In its original Greek it meant “revelation”: from άπο, to separate, and κάλυψις, veil, concealment; reveal, reveal—which should be antonyms but are synonyms. This is how the author of the book of that name used it: to say that his stories revealed a lot. But the narrative power of his Apocalypse It was so great that the word itself was trapped in its new meaning: the end of the world, the most dramatic end.

That unknown gentleman was one of the great writers in history. We have accepted that his name was John, a Christian of confused origin who the Roman emperor Domitian exiled, around 80 AD, on the Greek island of Patmos. We do not know more, but on Patmos there is still a cave where that outlaw would have written it. It is next to a very winding road; When the bus passes by the driver shouts apokalypsi, apokalypsi and the passengers look at each other, nervous, and laugh. The cave has a small, triangular window that overlooks the waters of Skala Bay: they say that the imprisoned exile looked from there at the storms that perhaps inspired him. “Then I took the little book from the angel’s hand and ate it, and in my mouth it was sweet as honey, but when I had eaten it my belly became bitter,” he wrote of his own book. That he fulfilled the greatest wish of any exile: that his words return to the place from which he was expelled and become, there, an effective word, one that creates realities.

He Apocalypse de Juan told what would happen when his god got tired of that rotten world and, instead of patching it up like any social democrat would do, decided to destroy it and take his people to a so-called “Kingdom of Heaven.” Juan’s stories are vivid, tremendous: a stampede of morbid details, a horror movie without the movie, monsters and flames and various catastrophes, all the weapons of divine wrath destroying this infamous world and its infamous inhabitants.

It was a splendid fiction, only no one believed it was fiction and there were millions who believed it: word of the Lord. That text was much more than a text: it was the way in which so many understood the world for two millennia, an intensely shared reality. All that time men and women lived waiting for that revelation to come true. He never did, but he founded a concept: the illusion that a great ending is the best beginning. Apocalypses used to be—and hence their triumphs—the violent welcome to hope.

There were many moments in which apocalyptic terror and illusion once again prevailed: round dates, verbose semi-messiahs, plagues, wars, droughts, bloodthirsty kings. And lately, when Christians stopped believing in him, others replaced him. The penultimate apocalypse that we invented was very extraordinary: for the first time men gained a power that until then they granted to the gods, that of devastating the world. For the first time that destruction was humanly possible, a certain threat. But it had a problem: the nuclear apocalypse was an ending that did not open the door to something better. The same thing happens, now, with the climate apocalypse: they say it ends us but nothing that we want begins. It could be one of the biggest cultural changes of these times: now the fashionable apocalypses are goodbyes that only say goodbye, that do not inaugurate any new world.

We live in an apocalyptic state: the widespread, poorly understood feeling that everything is going to hell. The illusion does not give up. Although any observer can attest that there is a single characteristic that unifies all apocalypses since that first one: that they never come to pass. Apocalypses, like viruses, are not stupid, and they know that, if they killed us all, they would be the first to suffer: they would disappear. Apocalypses need us to continue imagining them.

And we continue. I would like to know what the world will be like when we become adults and stop inventing things. When we finally convince ourselves that there will not be a brutal ending and a magical beginning: that we will have to work to change, step by step, everything that makes us want this world to apocalypse, to burst once and for all all.

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