Apocalyptic Books, Reports, Articles, Blogs...& random quotes and prophesies

"— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing." ~ Macbeth

"Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark."
       ~ Bertrand Russell 

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind
        — H. L. Mencken

The World Is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
     ~ William Wordsworth

"And still another inquiry remains...whether leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; or whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff."
     ~ Herman Melville

"What was the beginning of this end? Some might say Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge. I say it was Prometheus, a Titan, a son of gods, who in Greek myth stole fire from his parents and gave it to human beings. The gods were so mad they chained him naked to a rock with his back exposed, and had eagles eat his liver.

And it is now plain that the gods were right to do that. Our close cousins the gorillas and orangutans and chimps and gibbons have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals, but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than 200 years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels.

...All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery.

And nobody can do a thing about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party, but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one."

                   ~ Kurt Vonnegut, The End is Near

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” ― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

…the disinterested seeker after truth is always the pessimist, the alarmist, the iconoclast.

      ~ Benjamin De Casseras, An Evaporating Universe

Universal unhappiness is caused by the inability of infinite appetite to subsist on a finite number of crumbs.

      ~ Ibid.

The Vanishing Book of Life ~ a lecture by eminent professor Eric R. Pianka has quite a raucous history behind it, having been originally presented as his 2006 acceptance speech for the Distinguished Texas Scientist Award, bringing hysterical charges from right-wingers he was advocating Ebola genocide and so forth.  It's well worth reading the notes from the first link.

Apocadocs - Just two funny guys who are "Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies" read the blog, and get the book!

Excerpt from The Death of the Post-Human:  Essays on Extinction, Volume One by Claire Colebrook:

"How is it that the human species, seemingly so hungry for life and dominance, has conveniently forgotten its own self-extinguishing tendencies? We can only pose the question of human extinction—the fact that humans will become extinct, the fact that we cause other extinctions, and also that we are extinguishing what renders us human—if we locate the problem of climate change inaction in a broader terrain of ecological destruction. The very climates—cognitive, industrial, economic, affective, technological, epistemological and meteorological—that render our life possible are also self-destructive (both destructive of the self, and destructive of climate itself).

from wiki, about Medusa:

Medusa has sometimes appeared as representing notions of scientific determinism and nihilism, especially in contrast with romantic idealism.[22][23] In this interpretation of Medusa, attempts to avoid looking into her eyes represent avoiding the ostensibly depressing reality that the universe is meaningless. Jack London uses Medusa in this way in his novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore:[24] 

I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
                        ~ Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

Click here to download or order from Amazon
Click here to read the pdf online

“We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice. We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us. Or we can squander our 15 billion year heritage in meaningless self destruction." ~ Carl Sagan 

The excellent GlobalRiskReport offers timely links to news and blogs in a user-friendly format, constantly updating to our favorite doomy sites.

A nice compilation of the futility of expecting green energy to save a depauparate world.

World Wildlife Fund 2014 Living Planet Report - 1/2 of wildlife has disappeared in the last 40 years.

from Masters Of The Planet, The Search For Our Human Origins (2012) ~ Ian Tattersall: “…there was something DIFFERENT about these new migrants [Homo sapiens]: namely an unprecedented ability to intensify their exploitation of the environments around them. …When behaviorally modern humans moved into Europe, the behaviorally archaic Neanderthals yielded. When they moved into southern Asia it was Homo erectus, which flourished equally late in its last southeast island redoubt, that promptly disappeared. The same went, a little later in time, for those unfortunate Hobbits of Flores; and probably also in poorly documented Africa for any other hominids that may have survived the rigors of MIS 4. There was clearly something SPECIAL about the new invaders. From the very beginning of hominid history, the world typically supported several different kinds of hominid at one time—sometimes several of them on the very same landscape. In striking contrast, once behaviorally modern humans had emerged from Africa, the world rapidly became a hominid monoculture. This is surely telling us something very important about ourselves: thoughtlessly or otherwise, we are not only entirely intolerant of competition, but uniquely equipped to express and impose that intolerance. It’s something we might do well to bear in mind as we continue energetically persecuting our closest surviving relatives into extinction.

A New Green History of the World by Clive Ponting...excerpts [how quickly we forget!]

“The origins and effects of widespread famine can be illustrated by the events of 1315-17 when medieval Europe experienced its worst ever food shortages at a time when the population was at the very limit that the agricultural system could support. In 1314 the harvest was reasonable but the weather in 1315 was dreadful, being wet in every season. The spring sowing failed in most areas because of waterlogged fields, ploughs stuck in the mud and the hay crop was not properly ripe or dry when cut and stored. Crop yields were about half the normal level and what was available was of low quality. 

By early 1316 food was already in short supply across the whole of Europe and seed for the next crop was being eaten. The winter and spring were again very wet and the rain continued through the summer, producing another harvest at about half the average level. The resulting food shortage brought catastrophe to most of Europe. Wheat prices rose to three times their normal level and in some places of acute shortage they were over eight times higher. This meant that many of the poor could no longer buy food but even people with money could not buy simply because there was no food available – as Edward II discovered for himself when the court arrived in St Albans in August 1316. The King of Bohemia lost thousands of sheep because he could not buy feed for them. All over Europe animals were killed in large numbers as feed supplies ran out. 

The poor were dying in large numbers or turned to robbery in an attempt to get food; huge bands of starving peasants swarmed across the countryside. The food that was available was often of very low quality – bread was mixed with pigeon and pig droppings, and animals that had died of disease were eaten, causing outbreaks of disease in the human population. Some people were driven to even more desperate measures, as the many reports of widespread cannibalism in an area stretching from England to Livonia on the Baltic coast bear witness. In Ireland in 1318 bodies were dug up from graves to provide food and in Silesia executed criminals were eaten. There were still numerous cases of cannibalism as late as 1319. 

Animal diseases, increased by the lack of feed, added to the carnage, killing about 70 per cent of the sheep in some areas and in the four years 1319-22 some two-thirds of Europe’s population of oxen died. Only slowly did better weather and improved harvests bring some relief from the catastrophe.”

From DiscardStudies.com - an Interactive Visualization of the Global Flow of Electronic Waste

Herman Daly opines on the "three limits to growth" - our favorite?  The "ecological catastrophe limit", of course!  "I should note that the assumption of a continuously and smoothly increasing marginal cost (disutility) curve is quite optimistic. Given our limited understanding of how the ecosystem functions, we cannot be sure that we have correctly sequenced our growth-imposed sacrifices of ecological services from least to most important." - [Correct, because most assume that climate change is the greatest potential existential threat - however, species extinction from over-hunting, habitat destruction and mainly pollution is causing an almost invisible ecological catastrophe already.]

“Truly the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret: death comes not as a curse but as a blessing to men.”
   ~ Ancient Greek Epitaph from Eleusis

“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.”
~ Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

"Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense - the creative act." ~ Kenneth Rexroth, World Outside the Window

It's the Sixth Mass Extinction! Wild animals, insects, coral reefs and trees are dying. This report is about the disappearing birds.

Above letter is from How Climate Scientists Feel in their own words

An interview with the author (Philippe Squarzoni) of the comic book, Climate Changed, in OnEarth

A Short History of Decay, E.M. Cioran...(also see The Trouble With Being Born and others) from Amazon:

E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history—focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science—in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects Man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces.

“Men argue, Nature acts.” ~ Voltaire

“The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”  ~ Voltaire 

“Civilization is coming to an end, you know.” ~ Dorothy Parker, interview in The Paris Review

Tropic of Chaos:  Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence ~ Christian Parenti

The Unpersuadables by Will Storr - and a review by Harriet Hall

The Doomsday Book, Gordon Rattray Taylor

[note:  this book is included as comic relief!]

Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth ~ David McNally et al..."Amid a global zeitgeist of impending catastrophe, this book explores the culture of fear so prevalent in today's politics, economic climate, and religious extremism. The authors of this collection argue that the lens of catastrophe through which so many of today's issues are examined distorts understanding of the dynamics at the heart of numerous problems, such as global warming, ultimately halting progress and transformation. Arguing that catastrophic thinking results in paralysis or reactionary politics, the authors posit that the myths of 2012 have negative affects across the political spectrum and urge activists not to give up their beliefs and instead focus on working on issues now instead of waiting until society has ended and needs to be rebuilt."

An essay by Richard Pauli - Suborning Murder

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/johngray?guni=Article:in%20body%20link

Defaunation in the Anthropocene - Study published in Science Magazine - 

“So profound is this problem that we have applied the term “defaunation” to describe it.  This recent pulse of animal loss, hereafter referred to as the Anthropocene defaunation, is not only a conspicuous consequence of human impacts on the planet but also a primary driver of global environmental change in its own right.  In comparison, we highlight the profound ecological impacts of the much more limited extinctions, predominantly of larger vertebrates, that occurred during the end of the last ice Age.  These extinctions altered ecosystem processes and disturbance regimes at continental scales, triggering cascades of extinction thought to still reverberate today.”

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” ~ Richard Dawkins

William Ophuls, author of Immoderate Greatness:  Why Civilizations Fail - Amazon description..."Immoderate Greatness explains how a civilization’s very magnitude conspires against it to cause downfall. Civilizations are hard-wired for self-destruction. They travel an arc from initial success to terminal decay and ultimate collapse due to intrinsic, inescapable biophysical limits combined with an inexorable trend toward moral decay and practical failure. Because our own civilization is global, its collapse will also be global, as well as uniquely devastating owing to the immensity of its population, complexity, and consumption. To avoid the common fate of all past civilizations will require a radical change in our ethos—to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness—lest we precipitate a dark age in which the arts and adornments of civilization are partially or completely lost."

Crazy eschatological website does a creditable job cataloguing mass animal die-offs from around the world.  How depressing is it that the fundamentalist Born-agains are right??

American Geophysical Union 2012 presentation by Brad Werner, geophysicist from UCSD, titled "Is Earth F**ked?" reviewed here

Stephen Hawking - "I think computer viruses should count as life.  I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created is purely destructive.  We've created life in our own image."

Last Song For Migrating Birds, article in National Geographic - a chilling depiction of humans at their most ignorant and rapacious

Chris Clugston, author of Scarcity, Humanity's Final Chapter, ecological and resource economist who painstakingly assembled the economic realities of NNR's - Non-renewable Natural Resources - of which there are many, and not just fossil fuels, but an alarming number of essential minerals and nonmetallic minerals for industrial economy are permanently scarce.

The Age of More, co-authors Norman Pagett & Chritina Tey "Like everyone else, we hope the problem will go away."

Manufacturing Consent (also a movie) authors Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Binding Up A World of Wounds ~ Peter F. Brussard, Trends in Ecology and Evolution

“Americans are cultivated like mushrooms from birth to death, kept in the dark and fed horseshit.” ~ Joe Bageant

Tropic of Chaos - Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence ~ Christian Parenti
"From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure."

http://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Investigation-Origins-Modern-World-ebook/dp/B000FC1H7I/ref=sr_1_2

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly.” ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Constant Battles, Stephen LeBlanc

Jason Box blog:  http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=1329

Danté

Daniel Quinn

John Zerzan

Climate Disruption: Are We Beyond the Worst Case Scenario? a typical rhetorical question, from Michael Jennings

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fate-Species-Human-Extinction/dp/1608192601

Blog, The Heat is Online

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/the-slaughter-bench-of-history/360534/

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley ~ "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

"When you finally have life figured out, God kills you." - Bill Burr

Paul Gilding, author of the book "The Great Disruption" - and The Cockatoo Chronicles on the web 

Dave Paiz - a bleak blogger who has a way with words
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2007/05/gone

“But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice. "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here." ~ Alice in Wonderland (you have to wonder ~ why is the Dodo bird here?)

http://ponziworld.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-idiocracy-is-facing-extinction.html

War Before Civilization - The Myth of the Peaceful Savage ~ Lawrence H. Keeley

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/01/ancient-baby-boom-native-americans_n_5546273.html?utm_hp_ref=science

George Marshall, Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

The Omnivore's Dilemma, author Michael Pollan

All That is Solid, Melts Into Air ~ Marshall Berman - wiki description

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eternal-fascinations/ 2010 special edition of SciAm - The End - "We all [like to] believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species," argued Michael Moyer, editor of Scientific American, in a special apocalypse-themed issue of the magazine last year. "Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special"  "Eternal Fascinations with the End: Why We're Suckers for Stories of Our Own Demise...Our pattern-seeking brains and desire to be special hep explain our fears of the apocalypse"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5OYmRyfXBY&app=desktop Al Bartlett's video at growthbusters

Comfortably Unaware, author Richard Oppenlander ~ global depletion and food responsibility, website

Alan Watts

"I-and others- have been saying for years that destruction of the environment is based on contempt for everything outside the human skin, failure to see that as a field flowers, the planet peoples, and ignorance of the fact that the oceans, the air, and even the solar s...

Too Smart For Our Own Good, Craig Dilworth

Cadillac Desert, about the history of (disappearing) water in the US west

The Bulldozer in the Countryside; Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism -  Adam Rome, 2001

Road to Survival, William Vogt, 1948

William Ruddiman, author of Earth Transformed, from wiki:  Ruddiman is best known for his "early anthropocene" hypothesis, the idea that human-induced changes in greenhouse gases did not begin in the eighteenth century with advent of coal-burning factories and power plants of the industrial era but date back to 8,000 years ago, triggered by the intense farming activities of our early agrarian ancestors.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/14/13000-year-old-skeletons-war-dead-british-museum

ANYTHING by Cory Morningstar, start with Wrong Kind of Green

“So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

"Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

http://peakoilbarrel.com/collapse-inevitable/

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/15/what-killed-giant-beasts-mammoths-climate-change-or-man

Transcript of High School Teacher Greg Craven's epic emotional meltdown at the 2010 AGU meeting saying to scientists: "You must stop selfishly pursuing your pleasure in finding things out. To be frank: fu*ck your research. We. Need. You." - Hey, Greg!  You shouldn't have apologized!

An Appalachian Tragedy, 1999 - about pollution killing the forests...excerpts and review

Global Alert - author, Jack Fishman ~ how human activity is creating an atmosphere toxic to vegetation

Slavoj Žižek Living in the End Times

Nitrogen Cascade - Townsend - Worst Environmental Disaster You've Never Heard of

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/japan-and-how-i-failed-to-figure-it-out.html

CultureChange blog maintained by Jan Lundberg, who, even if he is biased towards irrational hope, is awesome because he wants to bring back the days of the sailing ships

Michael Tobis Planet 3.0 in which he bashes the doomers because he knows better - 

TomsDispatch - The Coming Instant Planetary Emergency published in The Nation

Scientific American article, Humankind's Enduring Fascination with the Apocalypse

The so-called Mayan apocalypse is just the latest in a long line of doomsday predictions

The Last Days of Mankind ~ Karl Kraus - website with English translation

Margaret Klein's incipient fundraising attempt to inaugurate the most redundant "save the world from climate change" movement ever, which is saturated with her personal brand of syrupy saccharine pop psychologizing - The Climate Mobilization

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/research/equable/climate.html

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.” ~ Tennessee Williams

Royal Society State of Nature report with a forward by David Attenborough - ridiculously overoptimistic! (savaged here)

Robin Westenra -  New Zealand blogger who follows the latest science and makes sense of it.  Nice horse too.

A quiet reflective weekly blog, I Got Somethin To Say 

Skil.org - Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory...Jack Alpert's heroic effort to "Change the Course" via films, lectures, conferences, and essays...

The Extinction Protocol - blog - may be overwrought, often happens when "God" intrudes

Doomer Nation blog

https://news.vice.com/article/famine-and-climate-change-are-making-africa-a-terrorist-tinderbox?utm_source=vicenewsfb

Aristophanes

Juvenal

Joanne Wideman
Marilyn Hempel
Kathleene Parker
Diana Hull
Sally Epstine
Michael Parenti?
Sam Harris?


http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/06/nasal-gazing-or-eli-too-has-question.html

Dahl
Pimentel
Alpert?
Steven Solomon
Brent
Collins
Quinn
Kendall

Michael Ruppert - Mike had a tendency to embrace some truly fringe stuff.  But, he was an impassioned advocate for justice and peak oil awareness, and his sincere pursuit of truth, no matter how many quirky side tracks he made, merits the intense mourning his many followers expressed following his suicide in April 2014. Author Crossing the Rubicon, subject of the movie Collapse.  A retrospective article in Verge published July 22, 2014 gives a balanced view of his tumultuous life.

Damn the Matrix http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/

Darkness
By Lord Byron (George Gordon)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
   For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.