A visit to my hometown. To my home suburbs, W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …' When did it go wrong?, W. asks. Where did it go wrong?
He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no expanse!, W. says. There are no vistas! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …
This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies above the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.
These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?
Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …
It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of hope, W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.