Frank Kermode

"[A]lthough for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent."

"[E]schatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present in every moment, the types always relevant."

"We project ourselves–a small, humble, elect perhaps–past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle..."

"They [Millenarians] had, as Bultmann puts it, abolished history in favour of eschatology; but it was a premature abolition. Already in St. Paul and St. John there is a tendency to conceive of the End as happening at every moment; this is the moment when the modern concept of crisis was born - St. John puns on the Greek word, which means both judgment and separation. ...In the sacramental church, says Bultmann, eschatology is not abandoned but is neutralized in so far as the powers of the beyond are already working in the present. No longer imminent, the End is immanent. So that it is not merely the remnant of time that has eschatological import; the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a benefaction from the End, now immanent."

"The Sense of an Ending" is a brief history of the paradigm and some of its variations. Kermodes book is an impressively learned, eloquent and brilliant defense of a non-schismatic view of human time. "At some very low level"- biological or psychological- "we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature." Mans position existentially is intermediary; he is born and dies "in the middle of things." What Kermode calls "fictions" (in both literature and the rest of life) are those "coherent patterns" which, by providing or implying an ending, "make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle." These temporal fictions "humanize the common death" and allow us to coexist with temporal chaos."