The End of the World Again

Americans are practical people and we know that when it comes to interests, they never let sentiment intervene. And yet, America is the land of choice for mysticism. It is on its soil that the most mysterious and fearsome sects flourish, and that faith in God, the Virgin or the Devil gives rise to all crimes as well as all sacrifices.

Strange contradiction. Next to the businessman, the naïve candor of the believer. Next to the ferocious champion of stuggle for life, the bleating prophet who accepts all the jokes that are offered to him.

How to explain this opposition? I do not take it upon myself. The psychology of crowds and nations is not my thing.

A recent example of the touching and disarming candor of the children of the country of dollars was provided to us by the newspapers. There is, over there, a sect called Seven Days Adventists who believe, hard as iron, that we are on the eve of the end of the World. When I say on the eve, I am slightly mistaken, because this catastrophe was to occur exactly on the 6th, at midnight, and today is the 7th, if I am not mistaken.

Already, during the last eclipse of the sun, the followers of this sect had sold all their possessions, under the pretext that they would not need them at all in the other World. This was, perhaps, very wise. But this sale remained ineffective. Since the end of the World presupposed the disappearance of all human bipeds, it followed that the new buyers of goods were housed in the same place as the old ones. And it is here that we find, in their worst crises of mysticism, the delicious practical sense of the Americans, their taste for order, their love of method.

Having thus settled their little affairs definitively, the members of the Seven Days Adventists sect met on Long Island and patiently began to await the end of the World which, as I said, was announced for February 6, at midnight.

However, the end of the world did not come. It will, no doubt, be for another time. The disillusioned believers will not find their goods, but they will be able to run to the notary who will pay them the amount of the sale. It is always good to take certain precautions, even with the end of the World.

However, it is reported that one of the believers, seized with vertigo on seeing that the World was not deciding to end, threw himself into the street, from the sixth or seventh floor. This one showed himself to be logical. He imitated Mohammed who, seeing that the mountain was not coming to him, went towards the mountain. The World not deciding to annihilate itself by annihilating itself, it preferred to eliminate itself and, as a result, the World was eliminated for it.

The true end of the World is the end of the conscious being for whom the World is only a projection of its perishable and changing self.
There is not, there cannot be, an end of the World. There are only various aspects of universal life. What we call death is only one of the manifestations of this eternal life. It consists in the destruction of an agglomeration of cells which, dispersed, will reform elsewhere.

The end of the World!... A lie like so many others.
The end of the World is within us. To be sure of seeing the end of the World, one only has to imitate the American citizen. One only has to jump out the window.

Victor MERIC.