The Millennial Moment of Truth -- As the clock turns, prophecies, visions, and phantasms fill the air

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December 16, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff

"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). This copy of the print is thought to have been hand-colored by Dürer himself.

As the year 2000 approaches, visions of a Y2K apocalypse haunt even the sanest heads. But in this time of millennial fever it is good to remember that people of former times often watched their calendars with near hysterical trepidation – and yet somehow managed to survive.

One of the best places to remind oneself of this reassuring fact is at Houghton Library’s exhibition, "TEOTWAWKI: Futuristic Visions in Houghton’s Collections."

The title is an acronym for "The End of the World as We Know It," a phrase made famous in a song by the rock group R.E.M. According to the curator of the exhibition, Karen Nipps, it has become Internet shorthand for all things related to the millennium and its attendant problems – digital, social, political, and theological.

"Try plugging those letters into a search engine and see what you get," said Nipps, who is a senior rare book cataloger. (A quick search of Yahoo yielded 3,509 Web pages!)

"I just used the acronym to hang this idea on – that artists and writers of previous generations have derived inspiration from contemplating what our future will be like," said Nipps.

Armageddon by Philip Francis Nowlan, a paperback science fiction novel.

The term "TEOTWAWKI" also emphasizes a theme that Nipps believes unites all this material. "It’s not so much about the end of the world per se, but the end of the world as we know it, the idea of peering into time or space and seeing a very different world from the one we’re familiar with."

The exhibition opens with the work of a poet/seer whose visions of the next world have had a profound impact on the human imagination – Dante Alighieri. Two early printed editions of the poet’s 14th-century epic The Divine Comedy are on display, one published in 1481 and the other in 1568. The earlier edition includes a watercolor illustration depicting the entire scheme of Dante’s vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

To underline the timelessness of Dante’s vision, Nipps has included in the exhibition a selection of brooding monotype illustrations by artist Michael Mazur created for national poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1994 translation of Dante’s Inferno.

A different case contains works inspired by another perennial source of apocalyptic imagery, The Revelation of St. John the Divine from the New Testament. These run the gamut from a fanciful 15th century block book (with text and colorful cartoon-like illustrations carved on a single block of wood) to the famous woodcut Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer. This particular print is believed to have been hand-colored by the artist.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, visions of other worlds began to appear whose inspiration was not specifically Christian. Statesman and author Thomas More’s Utopia not only presented a picture of a perfect society, but its title (meaning "no place") became a permanent part of our vocabulary.

The trend of constructing fanciful, often satiric visions of other worlds continued with the work of Cyrano de Bergerac, 17th-century author and swashbuckler, and the inspiration for Edmund Rostand’s 19th-century eponymous play. On display is the first English edition of Cyrano’s Selenarhia, or The government of the world in the moon, printed in London in 1659.

The next case contains a 1726 edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a 1752 edition of Voltaire’s Le micromégas, an exquisitely illustrated 1688 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante (The Year 2440) by Louis Sébastien Mercier, an 18th-century vision of the remote future considered to be the first science fiction novel.

The Architecture of the Unlikely
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, architects joined writers in visualizing possible worlds. On display is a visionary and probably unbuildable architectural design by Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, which won second place in the 1785 Prix de Rome. Fontaine may have felt that his grandiose concepts were more fully appreciated when he later became the favorite architect of Napoleon Bonaparte.

What exhibition of visionary art and writing would be complete without the work of William Blake, the English poet and artist who combined bold religious ideas with revolutionary social criticism? The exhibition contains four of his distinctive illustrations together with the work of another artist whose work makes Blake’s look conservative. This is John Brabham, an early-19th-century American whose ecstatic, brightly colored watercolors reflect the otherworldly milieu of revivalist preaching.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the publication of many works that have become classics of the science fiction and future fiction genres. The exhibition contains books by Camille Flammarion; Auguste, Comte de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam; Jules Verne; William Morris; H.G. Wells; and others. Of special interest is an 1898 edition of Wells’ The War of the Worlds with a sketch by the author on the flyleaf depicting a hapless Earthman running in terror from a Martian monster.

As the 20th century marched onward, the promise and peril of the future seemed to offer an ever more compelling subject for both artists and writers. A volume of visionary designs published in 1933 by architect Iakov Georgievich Chernikhov reflects the early Soviet Union’s faith in technological and social progress, while a 1919 story by the French writer Blaise Cendrars called Le fin du monde (The End of the World), illustrated by Fernand Léger, takes a more sardonic view of what the future holds in store.

Those of us who spent our childhood and adolescence devouring science fiction may find some familiar friends in the next case – a plethora of paperback originals, complete with garish cover art, by such familiar authors as Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

The exhibition ends with an assortment of works by various authors, including a handwritten version of Tennyson’s prize-winning undergraduate poem "Armageddon" and an original typescript of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot.

The exhibition will continue through Feb. 26, 2000, although, as Nipps cautions mischievously, "the closing date of the exhibition is hypothetical at this point depending on what transpires when the clocks turn on January 1." In any case, it is free and open to the public.