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We do not know exactly what Eliot was thinking when he put down these final lines from his poem, The Hollow Men. The whole poem is bleak, despairing, but why? Perhaps something personal. Perhaps it was his vision of Europe after WWI.  Perhaps the whole world always. Eliot did convert to Christianity in 1927, and that could suggest that he might have given up on this world, whatever is ahead. There is a clue in the last section where he repeats a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the Kingdom . . . .”  Maybe that was his hope.

Whatever Eliot had in mind, though, we can use the lines as we want, and as we consider the world today we may seriously wonder what will come first: the bang or the whimper; nuclear destruction or environmental chaos; radioactive seas and lands devoid of life or starving, diseased remnants of every species in every land struggling to survive; volcanoes or drifting deserts.  For what they are worth, recent political events seem to soften the threat of the former, but no amount of rhetoric will spare us from a warming planet and its consequences.

Of course no one knows tomorrow, but thoughtful people will think ahead today. Perhaps we cannot build a Paradise, but we might be able to prevent an Inferno.