What if we had only decades left before the final harvest capable of feeding the world? Accustomed to Earth’s abundance year after year, can we imagine an end to something so eternal? In thirty short passages, from pruning dandelions with her four-year-old to grappling with the mathematical theory of infinity, art historian and writer Annabel Howard moves through a mind-warping process of fathoming a world where the cycles that have sustained us since the beginning of time cease. Following her fascination with the apocalyptic imagery in Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity, she contemplates how imagining the end of the infinite is not radical for our time, but rather an enduring way of giving shape to inconceivable realities. Like all of us, she reaches for certitude amid the fear of a world aflame, only to glimpse the paradox of apocalypse: that in ending there lies beginning. 

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Image © Carolyn Drake / Magnum Photos.

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