It is not that we have fled the world we knew ... it is rather that the world we knew has fled from us. So we have become the refugees that never left home, indeed, whose world was lost precisely while we stayed home.
19 May: Sacasas on becoming refugees in our own homes
“As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity.”
Nothing to do with modernity. As long as human beings are aware of their own imminent death, they will feel themselves to be living at the end of time - because they are. See Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction OUP 1967) and Damian Thompson on apocalyptic thinking (The End of Time, 1996). COVID-19 is just another version of the year 1000, or the rapture - a perfect hook for all our fears of death.
The idea that the world will go on without me is anathema to the ego (and of course it won’t - the world the ego exists in is the ego’s own invention and must die with it)
19 May: Sacasas on becoming refugees in our own homes
“As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity.”
Nothing to do with modernity. As long as human beings are aware of their own imminent death, they will feel themselves to be living at the end of time - because they are. See Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction OUP 1967) and Damian Thompson on apocalyptic thinking (The End of Time, 1996). COVID-19 is just another version of the year 1000, or the rapture - a perfect hook for all our fears of death.
The idea that the world will go on without me is anathema to the ego (and of course it won’t - the world the ego exists in is the ego’s own invention and must die with it)
and yes, our individual apocalypses may well be our great unveilings! or not.