Henryson blights Cresseid with leprosy, and makes a tale which is both apocalyptic – the lovers' fate reflects a whole history of warfare – and intimate.
"At the end of 'The Cabin in the Woods,' the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate -- an actual hand, mind you -- yet that is not a spoiler, not really," writes Mark Olsen of the Voice in the first sentence of his review, apparently unaware that giving away the ending of a movie counts as a spoiler.
Tuesday was an evening of biology as destiny, genetically groomed specimens caught up in a battle over prescription drugs, the gulf between rich and poor, and apocalyptic pronouncements about the fate of the post-millennial world.
A blend of myth, history and contemporary comment, much affected by premonitions of the pending World War II, it aptly conveys Orozco's dour, apocalyptic vision of human fate.
Each essay includes an autobiography of the patriarch, including many elements of folk history (Haggada); an admonitory passage warning against the specific vice of the patriarch; and a prophecy, sometimes with apocalyptic overtones, explaining the fate of the patriarch's sons in the Last Age.
But for all the advance publicity, the publication of "Russia in Collapse," a 204-page volume of apocalyptic musings about the fate of the nation, begs a question that has dogged its 79-year-old author since his return from exile four years ago: Who in Russia today is prepared to read what Mr. Solzhenitsyn has to say?
It pits a dangerous and wily microbe against scientific medicine and epidemiology in a potentially apocalyptic battle over the fate of humanity.
In political terms, for the populist parties in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the issue is also about maintaining a handhold on power by dosing professions of democracy into apocalyptic visions of their countries' fate.
Some predictions of Europe's fate verge on the apocalyptic.
We live at an apocalyptic moment, a moment when the fate of our civilization is revealed, and fundamental choices are posed.
