Perhaps The End Has Come

Perhaps the end has come. Who knows? These things do not come with signposts and labels that explain everything that can be known. These are not items set out neatly in a display cabinet, each with its own label describing it and setting out its context in relation to those around it.

These things are more like tracks out in the wild, odd marks that are ambiguous, that need expertise and understanding to interpret. The trail of fox footprints running parallel to those of a badger in the snow, do not mean that some event out of a children’s story took place, some meeting of all the animals in the woods as the snow fell all around them. Nothing more than a coincidence brought those footprints together to be seen as the dawn breaks along the path. A closer look shows the badge prints have snow in them while the fox’s do not, which shows they happened at different times.

This world is like that, what initially seems so simple, straightforward, what can be a story we tell with confidence and with certainty, later seems so implausible, so much in contradiction to what we later know that we wonder how anyone could ever have believed it, or thought it could ever be true.