Frank Kermode in his book The Sense of an Ending suggests that we live in perpetual crisis because of the way we, in our various non-indigenous Western cultures, structure the story of what it means to be human. Simply, because of this apocalyptic story we know what our lives mean because we already know the ending. The apocalypse of the western and middle-eastern religious worlds has become, instead, the tragedy of the personal—a sense of failure, of powerlessness in the face of the inexorable—but the sense of crisis has yet to dissipate. Apocalypse and tragedy is, for us, the same story but on a more individual scale, despite all the evidence that we have that the “end” never actually arrives. “We continue to assume…that there is a tolerable degree of conformity between the disconfirmed apocalypse and a respectfully modern view of reality and the powers of the mind. In short, we retain our fictions of epoch, of decadence and renovation, and satisfy in various ways our clerkly skepticism about these and similar fictions.”

It is the fact that we have told many stories about how things were originally perfect for us, how they changed for the worse turning us into aliens in our own garden, and finally how it all gets resolved returning us forever to a state of communion, that gives us rules by which we can guide our behavior as well as the behavior of others. The story gives us the courage to face all that we don’t know, don’t understand and don’t control and because of that we refuse to remember that it is, in fact, a story.

What resists—to the death sometimes—any reasonable light is the idea of a knowable ending. If one precognition of “the end” does not come true, if instead the next day there is just the grocer and the dirty laundry and the rent due, instead of questioning whether there will in fact be a clean-cut end to all the chaos and the merely contingent, we assume we just got the date wrong. We want to know how life turns out. If we don’t know, if we can never know, then maybe all the choices we have made make no sense, have no meaning, have no purpose. “Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified.” We story away the unknown and adjust the details as things change, make “adjustments in the interest of reality as well as of control.”

The not knowing, the places that story cannot penetrate, the intellectual dark, all that we can never know, is an immane universe—and that void, those places that we can never understand, never encompass, never realize, make of both the metaphorical and physical dark a scary place.