On Apocalypse and language

 Verecundus’s other surviving work is a commentary on Scripture, and one might naturally assume that he was thinking of the final book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse of John. The Greek apocalypsis literally means an “unhiding” or “unveiling”—hence the book’s English title, Revelation. Since what was “unveiled” to John was the end of the world, “apocalypse” has acquired a secondary sense that has long trumped its primary one. We now use it to mean a cataclysmic destruction, one that wipes out most or all life.

Perhaps surprisingly, Revelation has little to say about fire. Verecundus’s description looks instead to a verse from the Second Epistle of Peter: “The day of the Lord will come…and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” 

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Two of these episodes were identified with mythical stories, now best known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. One is the great flood of which Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were the sole survivors, reconstituting humanity from stones. The other is the fiery cataclysm caused when the youthful Phaethon tried to drive the chariot of his father, the Sun. Veering too close to the Earth he scorches its surface, drying up rivers and turning the Ethiopians black. Eventually Jupiter, the supreme god, has to step in and destroy him with a thunderbolt.

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Still, Empson was right about the nature of the English language itself. Any piece of it seems susceptible to “alternative reactions,’ or as Joseph Conrad once wrote, “No English word has clean edges.” They all, the novelist thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than “instruments for exciting blurred emotions.”