It's the end of the world as we know it

Consider, for example, that scarcely six chapters into "Genesis"—mere pages after the account of the creation of everything—we're confronted by an angry God who ends nearly everything.

We are, it seems clear, conscious of the finitude of life, either All Life, or of our own lives. We reflect this so many ways.

There are the cosmic, end-of-everything finales that we explore in science fiction movies like I am Legend or Day of the Triffids, or the big buck action pix about a threat that will end everything, like Armageddon.

There are speculative novels that deal with the subject, like P.D. James' Children of Men or The Brief History of the Dead .

But the world can end in other ways as well.

There are scientific revolutions that force us, as Galileo did, to see the familiar cosmos as suddenly new and strange to us. There are historical events thatshake our assumptions: the start of the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s, the attacks of 9/11/01.

There are personal seismic shifts that shake us: divorce, death of a loved one, illness.

In Fall 2008, my freshman seminar at Webster University is looking at endings. We are reading:

• The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
  • Here is one response my class had to the book
• Children of Men by P.D. James
• The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• We are also reading, along with the members of the other 29 freshman seminars, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah.

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