There will be no other end of the word.

A Song on the End of the World
--Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

When we were discussing feminism in 452 (for just a minute) we played a Prisoner's Dilemma kind of game--boys against girls (men? women? we're adults I guess). The kind of thing that if both groups agree, they get 2 points, if both disagree they get one point, but if one agrees and one disagrees the disagreeing one gets 3 points. And there are three rounds. I may have written about this. In our class, we agreed to agree twice, then agreed to disagree (in part I think because I grew up playing games with Jeremy who is the most strategically ruthless person I've ever, you know, played games with so I insisted that we not let the men in the class to convince us to agree only to betray us). Dr. Muhlestein applauded our success, then told us that the groups rarely tie, that usually the women "trust" the men in the last round and get hosed.

The idea he was demonstrating was this idea of the last round. Both groups were kept honest in the first two rounds because they knew there was another round coming and they needed to seem trustworthy to maximize their points, but in the last round anything goes--there's no chance for revenge. I'm trying to remember what the real-world application of this was: something about property rights and women being subjugated. But I've been thinking about this also in my life.

I've been working really hard to come up with a personal justification for working hard (or at all, depending on the day), based not on threats of punishment or banishment, but on some sort of internal motivation. What this means is flipping around a lot of my inherited conceptions of authority and self-worth and God. I've spent most of my life doing stuff (poorly, actually--just well enough to count it done, right?) so I don't get in trouble I think. And that's of course a terrible way to live.

What I've been realizing lately (as my schedule's loosened up, as my academic success is so much more/less/different than grades) is that I'm waiting for the final round, for the inevitable, threatened punishment. But aside from a kind of hellish couple of weeks last December, aside from the awkward meetings with professors in the halls--because we both know that I was trying to pull a fast one--nothing really happened.

I'm in the same boat spiritually too--trying to push boundaries, to see if God really is so vengeful as he pretends to be. But he's not. He's not that interested in punishing me, and it's no skin off his nose if I waste my life waiting for him to smite me. There is no final round.

Or rather: every day is the final round. I'll fail at this and try again (maybe better?) later, but it comes again to presentness. To doing things well because that feels much better than slacking them off. Because there's no reason not to do them well. Because what else should I be doing right now? Not because if I do poorly I'll be punished but because there is no point in doing something than doing it. My life/education/salvation is today. There will be no other end of the world.