ABSTRACT

These lines from the end of the last act of King Lear encapsulate a defining experience of European consciousness: the feeling - ominous in the extreme - of living at a late stage of the world. They evoke a conviction which the late twentieth century - in which 'much more is real than is possible' - recognizes only too well: a sense of the sheer surfeit of eventuality, of burdensome plenitude which preempts, hence inevitably involves the foreclosure of, existence in time to come.3 They intimate a sense of destitution, both historical and personal, comparable, perhaps, to one of the most dreadful thoughts in European philosophy, itself the product of late reflection: Hegel's assertion that 'world history is not the ground of happiness'; 'periods of happiness are empty pages in it, since they are periods of harmony, suspensions of its dialectical movement' - and confined (it might be surmised by extending the metaphor) to the fly-leaves front and back, before the whole enterprise begins or after the whole business is finished.4