This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
Will the world end with a whimper, and not a bang? I ask that rhetorically, not because I know the answer but because I know Thomas Stearns Eliot, author of said verse, is not alive to defend his proposition.
I ask because recently while sitting at my desk, the state of the world, and its forlorn struggle on the path of progress (a fruitless task, I know) entered my thoughts. As this anguished reverie flowed behind my eyes, they caught some titles of the books on my shelves – titles such as Robert Fisk’s The Age of the Warrior and the Great War for Civilisation, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, We Did Nothing by Linda Polman, Bring on the Apocalypse by George Monbiot, two Oppenheimer biographies and The Violence of Empire by Caroline Elkins. They are all explorations of the state of the world, past, near past and present, and how the world came to be the way that it is. And how power is enacted.
They’re enlightening in their forensic reporting and scholarship, and dispiriting, because of it. I should have looked over my shoulder to the poetry shelves. Ah, but then poetry changes nothing, as Auden bleakly quipped. Which is true and yet not, a sort of Schrodinger’s cat of a dictum. It can change ways of looking and feeling. You can be alive to hope or see it dead in the water.
But then something happened, both shelves sort of met and coalesced. In the space between no thought and thought a whispering blew across the desk: to maintain some kind of equilibrium of the human spirit, within the human spirit in the conflict good v bad there has to be a continuous resistance against people, mostly men, doing bad things to other men and women and children. Otherwise, how to go on, how to look into the face of each new day with hope?
I knew that, of course, but at times a realisation will rise like the morning sun, and strike your inner landscape anew. The contours of the world become clearer. How to then defend your core, to strike your personal armour on the anvil of resistance?
This is a form of personal, intimate resistance, which one can pull on over the body, one that is impervious to the woes of the world without forsaking one’s sense of empathy and compassion. The elements of this armour are art and beauty and love.
Having now turned the corner into 2025, among history’s echoes, standing in a darkened doorway one will come across the figure of T.S. Eliot, and, across the English Channel in a country riven with civil discontent and political unrest, Germany, the Austrian corporal, freshly out of prison, Adolf Hitler.
'What will be the whirr of the world in decades to come? As history has shown, the whimper and the bang can emanate from and within each other.'
From a distance of 100 years, one can see how history is a jester and a sage at the same time, in the same year. In 1925, the world was greeted by Eliot’s The Hollow Men and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One produced one of the most famous and quoted few lines in literature (noted above), the other produced a manifest for the destruction of countries and the extermination of lives.
Such is the transcendence of Eliot’s The Hollow Men that it can capture the lightning of a storm on any given night, and the shadow in the hall on any given night. Eliot was writing in the aftermath of World War I. Optimism was in short supply. While it is true a poem can only ever be of that moment, it can have a chemistry that allows it to be transported through the ages, and connect again. Cast an eye over politics, and the seemingly inexorable rise of conscienceless decisions being made worldwide (a lament Shane Howard sings of) these days and try to resist the image of ‘we are the straw men’, souls lost. The image is consistent with straw being blown to the wind, or igniting, whimper or bang.
Hitler told the world of his ethos in 1925. It was such a tedious hectoring work, as was the second book, published a couple of years later, the world took little notice. But Hitler, one of history’s most terrible monsters, also knew about words. In Mein Kampf, he writes: ‘In this work I turn not to strangers but to those followers of the Movement whose hearts belong to it and who wish to study it more profoundly. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.’ And so he practised what he spoke. In a few years he would become the Fuhrer, and tens of millions of lives would be marked for death in global war.
The pairing of Eliot and Hitler in the one passage does involve confronting Eliot’s antisemitism. Many historians and critics, while lauding his work, write less favourably of his character. The esteemed critic Harold Bloom, for instance, unequivocally called Eliot an antisemite.
Anthony Julius, who wrote T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, noted in his book that only five poems of Eliot’s to be antisemitic: Burbank, Gerontion, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, A Cooking Egg, and Dirge, published after Eliot’s death. He says all Eliot’s antisemitism in his work faded after 1922. It was in 1922 that Eliot sent Ezra Pound his manuscript for The Wasteland. Pound reduced the manuscript by about half and Eliot dedicated the poem to him. Pound, of course, became one of Mussolini’s and Italian fascism’s loudest cheerleaders during WWII. He was captured by Allied forces, and spent 12 years in a psychiatric hospital in Washington.
Of course, this was all in the future from 1925. What will be the whirr of the world in decades to come? As history has shown, the whimper and the bang can emanate from and within each other. Will flowers of poetry bloom, will beauty survive?
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.
Main image: The Menin Road by Paul Nash, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)