One of the most fertile ideas the critic Frank Kermode floats in his influential book The Sense of an Ending is the distinction he draws between two kinds of time. One type he calls chronos, ordinary time that passes as one second per second; the other is kairos, a more transcendent and sublime kind of time. Chronos consists of all the ordinary moments with which our lives are filled but have no importance; they are routine actions that do not truly capture the human experience. Kairos are the points in time filled with significance that tell us who we are; the exciting and pivotal moments of our existence, charged with meaning.
We experience both chronos and kairos simultaneously, but we must live in chronos, in the normal progression of time. This can be fine, as we go about our lives, but we can come to feel that we are trapped in the tedium of the everyday. On the other hand, we are drawn to kairos – the right time, the special and magical time – but we can’t live that way twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Worse, it can be hard even discerning which are the truly important occasions in life. As in any story, their meaning is derived from their relation to the end.
But what could be more exciting and meaningful than the end itself? The ending is a key part of the story, we want to play a part in it, to be the heroes – not some insignificant character killed off prematurely. If humanity keeps on going thousands of years after our deaths, what was the point of our lives in the grander scheme of things? We are enticed by apocalypse because its arrival would make our time in the world more special. This is why people who predict the real-life end of the world place it imminently, within their own lifetime, and why most of those predictions aren’t really about the end but about times of transcendence and rebirth – capturing a moment of kairos that will last forever.
Most of us aren’t walking down the street wearing placards proclaiming the end is nigh. Instead we resort to our stories of disaster to explore our desire to escape the mundanity of life – imagining the starring role we could play, how the story of humanity unfolds, what it would be like to reduce the boredom of our everyday routines to one exciting purpose: survival. And so the reason why we are so drawn to the end, however grimly it is envisioned, is because we are tantalised by the gleam of wonder that kairos casts upon our humdrum lives.
The struggle to find meaning in our lives, the need to place ourselves at the centre of the story, is only natural. Our own life, our own experiences, are the only frames of reference that we have for existence. This is why the idea of the world carrying on beyond our deaths is so troubling, and why ultimately it’s impossible for us to imagine the end – ours or the world’s – through to its conclusion.
Our storytelling can only take us so far in making sense of our lives, because it is based in the idea of the lived experience. And since death is not lived through, by definition, it is not ‘experienced’ as another thing that happens day-to-day. We have no way to imagine ourselves as not existing. When we try and frame mortality and finality as a story, something in our mind rebels.
In reality what we envision is not really the end. As we’ve seen during the course of this book, humanity is forever creating loopholes, survivors, rebirths and trapdoors that enable us to skip away from the ultimate end of things and start anew. It’s almost as if the only way we can make sense of an ending is through new beginnings. We are trapped in linear time, but we also encounter time in cycles and recurrences: days, years, seasons. We watch the leaves fall from the trees in autumn, only to return again in spring. Life ebbs and flows.
If we cannot truly experience the moment of death, perhaps the end really is never. The universe, as we saw in Chapter 5, will most likely slowly decline into increasingly dark and chilly entropy, forever approaching and never quite reaching the parabolic flatness of ultimate end. Perhaps that is also how we will experience death – like a form of Zeno’s paradoxes, it is an end destination we can never truly arrive at. Of course it will ‘happen’, but not for us, not for our minds and consciousness. In the sense of lived experience, death will never arrive. Not only is ‘the end’ not nigh, it is impossible.
In September 1919, towards the end of the war to end all wars, Franz Kafka published a short story called ‘An Imperial Message’. It is a very short short story, barely a page long, although I think it is also one of the best things he ever wrote. As he was writing it, everything was falling apart in his world. He lived in Prague, one of the major cities of the soon-to-be-defeated Austro-Hungarian empire. The old emperor, Franz Joseph, had died late in 1916 at the age of eighty-six, having ruled since 1848.
