Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement
Thoreau. 1 8 Emerson advocated self-reliance, being "empowered by eloquence and vision" (Bloom 16), rather than being distracted by the "popgun" of Apocalypse that sounds like "the crack of doom" ("The American Scholar" 64). Rather than simplistic literalism, Dickinson endorsed telling "all the Truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies [...] The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind —" (1 129). Thoreau juxtaposed to a belief in the End of Time, a belief in being "anxious to improve the nick of time. [...] to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment" (10). If those 'ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day" were "injuring eternity"(4), the best remedy was not to believe that eternity would arrive next week or next month or next year with the Second Coming that was fantastic but to fill every minute of today so that one would have a sense of life and having lived that would be reality. "I went to the woods," Thoreau confessed, "because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if 1 could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that \ had not lived" (62). To do so he went fishing in the stream of time rather than progressing along the arrow of time to the End of Time. Against this nineteenth-century backdrop of unrealized apocalypse, Jenkins and LeHane's multi-volume twentieth- twenty-first-century sequential novel would appear even more fantastic were it not for the authors obvious, if unstated, commitment to an immanent apocalyptic moment. Missing from their work, however, is a date similar to Miller's "1843" or Ussher's October 1997—a definite time-certain for 1 8 Of those Millerites who stayed in the advent movement, who went beyond the pain and disappointment, some found new dedication and experienced religious awakening that resulted in a dramatic renewal of Shakerism, the establishment of the Church of the Seventh Day Adventists, and, later, the beginning of the Jehovah's Witnesses. As the advent historian, Jonathan Butler contends, "Like every other millenarian movement, Millerism met with obvious failure, and yet out of this failure eventually emerged another of the American sectarian success stories [...]. [The] durable, complex, and established Adventist sect [...]" (190). Rather than a belief in either Progress or Apocalypse, the lesson of Millerism appears to lie closer to those to be derived from a reading of Emerson's essays or Dickinson's poetry or, especially of Thoreau's Wcilden. "Not till we are lost [...] do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we arc and the infinite extent of our relations" (Waiden 1 18). 233
