The Apocalypse

Art sums up life, whereas Life itself sort of drags itself out until that last recorded syllable of time. Art is snazzy, snappy, and you may even dance to it. Life is a bit more like work.

The popular images of Apocalypse, or End of Times, are artistic products: films, novels, pamphlets, drawings, comic books, and lectures; they are all relatively brief - compared to geological aeons - and it is their precision that allows us to comprehend the message easily.

But Life is not so precise.

When the Future comes, we shall not be in Art, but we shall be in Life. We shall be slogging our way through the slough, so to speak, day after day.
We shall be living the Apocalypse and it will seem an interminable lengthy stretch of days, and we shall become accustomed to the novelties of the times, and they will seem commonplace to us.

We shall, in effect, not even be aware of it. Indeed, the only reason we should be aware of the Apocalyptic event referred to in Revelations is the fact that the writer decides to bring down the curtain at the end; there is no logical need to end Times (although there is a dogmatic need to): it was St. John's choice to write it that way, and probably that is the way he recalled his vision of it.
Natural disasters and wars and threats of wars can hardly be considered extraordinary to us who lived through the last 70 or so years,so we can hardly use them to prophesy end of days. Some of us do, to their chagrin.

Remembering those failed prophets who called for and expected the End of Times in the last 2,000 years, and how surprisingly disappointed they were, it seems as if there might not be the compelling need to end all things in the very Artistic and Linguistic and Dramatic way that John of Patmos did. John could not exceed his nature.

We are living those Hidden Things now.

That is the meaning of "Hidden".

It is Dramatic Art to discover what was hidden to the surprise of the audience.
It is Life to live the Hidden.
 
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