it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

                A whimper- not a scream, or a shout, or a cry. Just that tiny, last breath and the tiny, last noise it exhales. You’d almost rather have silence: something that seems so final and holds closure and gives one last moment to take a breath. It’s the in-between, the vacancy, the loneliness between scream and silence that scares us and holds a strange hollowness that you can’t quite place.

Yet that last moment- the end of the world- isn’t the only thing that holds this hollowness. The Hollow Men, trapped in one existence - who cannot become good or evil, cannot tell right from wrong- are the ones who speak of this hollowness at the world’s end, and maybe it’s because they know what it feels like firsthand.

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Those Hollow Men who have not done deeds good enough to enter the highest kingdom, but who have not sinned so badly as to enter the lowest. These are they who are hollow, who are vacant, who are lost.

                TS Eliot published “The Hollow Men” in 1925, a poem I think I first read in 8^th grade. The second line of the epigraph, inexplicably, has always stood out to me:

A penny for the Old Guy

This line, referencing the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, was one of the first things that came to my mind as we visited Parliament. In the House of Lords, I looked at the floor Guy Fawkes used to be beneath, nestled with his 36 barrels of gunpowder in the undercroft.

What if the plot had succeeded? 312 years later, where would we students have been standing? -would we have been standing anywhere? Would America even exist, let alone us and our university?

It’s remarkable the effect that one person can have on a history.

"…it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not, … righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness … neither good nor bad … wherefore, … it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery,"

Unsurprisingly, this is not Eliot; it’s Lehi. Yet the words that he teaches his son Jacob seem to echo an idea in “The Hollow Men”- that of the necessity for both righteousness and opposition. Without the two halves, where is the whole? You cannot have one without the other; there is a need for wickedness, for anarchy, for someone to stir the pot. Without Guy Fawkes and his plot, Catholics would never have been viewed with quite the same suspicion, and Protestantism wouldn’t have had the support that it gained from the Gunpowder Plot.

So, although it seems counterintuitive and maybe even a little bit psychotic, there seems to have been a need for the terror and fear and possibility of devastation that Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators brought. Without the opposition they created, there would have been no misery; thus, happiness too would have been impossible.

People would have been… hollow.

Parliament’s paintings burning on the walls- frescos becoming fire

Planes crumbling skyscrapers; David quelling Goliath, the fly felling the fortress

Faces looking out from cages, from fences, from their race and the yellow stars stitched onto sleeves

Our world is no stranger to pain. We as humans have always felt the sting of destruction and the cruel actions of those around us- yet, that is what makes possible the other half of our emotions. This devastation is what allows for an increase of love, and togetherness, and life.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

                Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, while they had their chance, did neither good nor bad. They didn’t burn down government buildings, or annihilate cities; they also didn’t serve the homeless or make the world a better place. The latter- although better than the former- cannot exist without the other.

                So, as I stood in Parliament, looking around the House of Lords, I imagined Guy Fawkes setting the place ablaze. I imagined the walls falling to pieces and smoke rising into the sky; but I guess I also imagined that last exhale, that moment of freedom, the knowledge of necessity.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Parliament's House of Lords

London "Guy Fawkes" Protest

Guy Fawkes