...but fear itself. Great quote. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it in 1933, to inspire Americans to rally against the entropy of the Great Depression. He was speaking against "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." You can read his whole speech if you like, over at Bartleby's. I thought this quote would be a good way to start out this blog category, where I whimper about things that, well, fill me with nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.

Unfortunately I have always had a fascination with catastrophe. I think a lot of it must be inborn. I know I get it from my mom, who has the same morbid streak. Although she is more drawn to the myriad ways in which one can meet one's own end, I am more mesmerized by the ways in which the world can end.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to fret about the end of the world. The worst that can happen, personally, is that I'll die, and I knew that was going to happen anyway. More than that, we know the world is going to end anyhow. Eventually. As a kid I was extremely fascinated (in a lie-awake-paralyzed-afterward kind of way) by the book of Revelation, where the end of the world is described in vague but alarming terms. One theme that definitely comes out of that book is that the smooth continuance of the world is not God's highest priority.

It's interesting also to realize the number of times that people have probably thought the world was ending in the past—with good reason. Their world ended, but the whole world didn't. The Fall of Rome. Jerusalem, A.D. 70. The Black Plague. Pompeii. The Holocaust. Hiroshima. Rwanda. Aids in Africa. All the apocalypse needs to do is to stretch to your own horizon, and it looks the same as the end of the world.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." Another great quote, this one by the character Gandalf in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, a book about the end of a world. I think that Tolkien and Roosevelt are on to something.

Having said that—sometimes I've just gotta rant about the latest bogeyman to rattle my subconscious, and this blog category is where I'm gonna do it. Fasten your seatbelts.