This Is The Way The World Ends

This Is The Way The World Ends:

David looked in the bathroom mirror and tried to see the resemblance of his former self. Wan and haggard, his face drooped, the victim of a pointless, wanton life. His squinting, red eyes searched vainly for a glimmer, even a shadow of long ago. Seeing only the face he'd come to accept as himself, he closed his eyes and lowered his head.

"The Hollow Men," odd that the T.S. Eliot poem had come into his head. He hadn't read it since his youth, and at the time it meant little to him; just a required poem for his Junior College English literature class. He read it and promptly forgot it. It wasn't the first, nor the last thing he did as rote; his whole life had been one of repetition, but not true learning. He graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, but never learned a thing; got a decent job with periodic pay raises, having never truly understood his role; married for love but never really learned to understand his wife (or to show her how to understand him) and wandered ungracefully into old age, not knowing a thing.

Certainly, he'd had dreams; though modest by most people's standards, he'd wanted friends and comfort but mainly to be understood. He married believing that in time his wife would be that one person who'd know him, that one special person who'd love him without reservation. Instead, he didn't think she knew him at all, not the person he wanted her to see. She focused on his failings and limitations, which were plentiful to be sure, but he believed that a husband and wife should understand each other on a deeper level, one where they understood

how the other wished to seem. He knew it was illogical and improbable, but that never stopped him from wishing...not until the day she finally gave up on him and left.

After she left he fell into fantasies; nothing extreme, he was far to prosaic to dream of Hawaii and hoola girls. His dreams tended to be with life; with the things, most people did normally. He created life in a vacuum as avoidance. In the vacuum, he couldn't get hurt.

He remembered a series of seemingly pointless, related dreams he'd had intermittently: He was a clown named Bonko, whose life, despite his profession, seemed to mirror his own. Bonko's regression too seemed to follow his downward spiral; suffering from self-knowledge, Bonko's descent was aided by drink and pills. At least he'd never followed that path, David never drank, never did anything the least bit out of character, but he knew he was a clown, that much he knew.

"The Hollow Men" he thought again, feeling opaque, oblique, and undefined. He chuckled ironically for he now understood the poem, its empty message, and vain hope.

Would his life have been different had he understood the poem in his youth? He doubted it, but held on to the belief momentarily.

"Where is my prickly pear now?" he asked himself, looking up into the mirror, "Not that I'd dance around it at this age," he scoffed incredulously.

False Gods were all he'd ever known, all he'd ever believed. But as he grew old, the prickly pears had faded and a real God had never materialized. He wished for one more false idol, but he knew life had taken care of that.

He thought of other literary pieces he'd ignored in his youth, and settled upon the myth of Icarus. He closed his eyes again and thought hard, he could see the

young man with his father Daedalus, flying in the sky, soaring to high, and

falling into the sea. He could feel that water rushing into his lungs, he gasped for breath, opened his eyes, and stared into the mirror...only him looked back.

He looked down and saw something white on the floor, a feather? He stooped down and touched it; he laughed, "Just a piece of tissue paper," but for a moment he'd believed.

He recited;

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! *

He laughed again, proud of his own continuing irony, "Mistah Kurtz, have yourself a penny," he continued, pleased with his wit.

He looked once again into the mirror: blank stare and empty thoughts, a man drowning in the Icarian Sea.

In a movie version the distinguished actor James Earl Jones would read the final lines from Eliot's poem as the camera faded to black on the staring David...

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.*

And then everything turns black....

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*From TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men"