ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, two itinerant scholars sought temporary respite from the demands of their intensive researches into marketing eschatology through taking the bracing air along the golden ribbon of dune and rock known as Malin Beg. As they meandered across the wildly beautiful strand, all of a sudden, there standing before them was a knotted whisper of a man who announced, without questioning or introduction, that his favourite way of revealing understanding about eschatology was to howl and hoot at a full moon, whilst reciting extracts from Faust. It then came to pass that, just as they were telling him about the Marketing Eschatology conference (Brown, Bell and Carson 1995) they had attended only a few days previously, his image began to slowly dissolve before their eyes. As it was doing so, the scholars heard the fading echo of a lilting melody ringing somewhere in the distance. The lyric was carried along by the scurrying breeze that darted between cliff and shore; and although it was barely audible, the scholars agreed that it seemed to be singing
in the darkness of the milling throng where ignorance and prejudice hold kingly court there’s yet a voice casts a lonely light upon the cant and capers of derivative thought…
And so it was that later that same day those earnest scholars of marketing eschatology found themselves howling and hooting at a gloriously full orb of a silver moon on a deserted beach somewhere in south Donegal, reciting the only quotation from Faust they could, at that time, muster from the murky depths of their collective memories:
I have, alas, studied philosophy, Jurisprudence and medicine, too, And, worst of all, theology With keen endeavour, through and through-
And here I am, for all my lore, The wretched fool I was before. Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot, For ten years almost I confute And up and down, wherever it goes, I drag my students by the noseAnd see that for all our science and art We can know nothing.
