Dublinesque

It doesn’t escape Riba that it’s characteristic of the imagination always to consider itself to be at the end of an era. For as long as he can remember he’s heard it said that we are in a period of maximum crisis, a catastrophic transition toward a new culture. But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era. We find it, for instance, in the Bible, in the Aeneid. It exists in every civilization. Riba understands that in our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically. If they manage to hold this funeral in Dublin, it can’t be anything other than a great parody of the weeping of a few sensitive souls for the end of an era. The apocalyptic demands a lack of excessive seriousness. After all, ever since he was a boy he’s been sick and tired of hearing that our historical and cultural situation is uncharacteristically terrible and in a certain way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But is this really true? It seems doubtful that our “terrible” situation is so different from that of our ancestors, as many of them felt the same as we do, and as Vok puts it, if our criteria seem satisfactory to us it would have been the same for them. Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety. Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we’re all going to die together or separately. In the end, thinks Riba, the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because actually, if I look at it properly, what it offers me is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of a funeral in Dublin, that is, it offers me what I’ve been most in need of recently: something to do in the future.