A Beautiful Closer

Oh, reader! It is time - the first of my yearly quests is almost at an end! Tomorrow I will return to my humble abode in mainland Britain, leaving the overbearing heat of Arizona far behind me. It has been a fantastic journey, escorting you through my various opinions and thoughts, but the school year is complete and now it is time for a break. Yet, as I've said before, writing is no longer an option, but a compulsion, so expect the odd update from my perspective back home after I've acclimatised. I will be back mid-way through August when this blog will be back to full force, with months of pent-up frustration and gritty angst ready to explode from my fingertips. I shall leave you in the same vein as I began, with an article relevant to our times. The much-mentioned Ian McEwan has been the object of our praise many times over, but here I bring you a much shorter work of non-fiction, written for Christopher Hitchens' compendium, The Portable Atheist, but also published in The Guardian some time ago. I cannot possibly summarise the message of the piece, but the title is 'The Day of Judgement', reflecting on the current crescendo of our death-wish culture, manifesting itself in suicide bombings and the bringing on of the apocalypse for religious purposes. I've been meaning to bring this to you for some time, but today and now seems the perfect time to do so, befitting of the somber mood of this post. Early into McEwan's piece he eloquently reminds us: "we cannot know the date of our demise, but we know the date must fall within a certain window of biological possibility which, as we age, must progressively narrow to its closing point", beautifully paraphrased by Philip Larkin in his poem, 'Aubade':

... The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.