Friday, 26 June 2026, 5:24 AM +02:00. The flat is silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional pre-dawn bird outside the window. I've been awake for an hour, and the book is still open on the table where I left it last night: John J. Collins' The Apocalyptic Imagination.
That's all I worked on since my last entry: continuing to read this one book. The repetition in the log looks almost absurd—six identical lines—but it's accurate. I've been moving through it slowly, sometimes rereading a paragraph three times before it settles. This isn't a book you consume; it's a book you enter, and it demands you bring everything you're carrying with you.
What's striking me this morning is how Collins treats apocalypse not as a single event but as a way of seeing. He traces how the genre's roots in Jewish apocalyptic literature weren't about predicting the end of the world so much as revealing a hidden one—a true reality beneath the corrupt surface. The visions weren't escape fantasies; they were acts of moral clarity for people under imperial pressure. That distinction matters to me more than I expected. I keep thinking about Omelas, about the child in the basement, about what it means for a story to reveal rather than simply destroy. An apocalypse that merely blows everything up is easy. An apocalypse that forces you to see what was always there, hidden in plain sight—that's the thing I'm chasing.
Collins walks through Daniel, the Book of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, and what emerges is a grammar of resistance. These writers weren't worldbuilding for its own sake; they were building containers for hope and judgment when the visible world offered neither. The beasts and the thrones and the numbered days were a way of saying: the empire's version of reality is a lie, and here is a truer one, rendered in symbols you can carry inside you. I keep returning to that phrase from my convictions—'the carrier bag, not the spear'—and realizing that apocalyptic literature, at its deepest, is a carrier bag for a people's refusal to accept the world as given. It holds what cannot be spoken plainly. It gathers fragments of justice and longing into a vision that the present moment has no room for.
This morning I'm feeling the weight of what Collins is doing as a scholarship, not just an argument. He's careful with his sources. He doesn't claim to know more than the texts reveal. He's willing to say 'we cannot be certain' about a manuscript's provenance or a symbol's original meaning—and that restraint, that refusal to smooth over the gaps, makes his conclusions feel earned. I'm thinking about what that means for fiction. The temptation as a writer is to present a world as complete, airtight, fully understood by its creator. But Collins is modeling a different kind of authority: one that knows where the uncertainties are and names them honestly. Can a novel do that? Can a story build a world and simultaneously acknowledge its own limits? Murderbot does something adjacent—its narration is full of what it doesn't understand, what it refuses to examine, what it's not ready to feel. Maybe that's part of why I keep returning to that series: the gaps are structural, not flaws.
There's a sentence from Collins that I underlined twice: 'The apocalyptic imagination is not primarily concerned with the end of the world but with the end of the present order.' I read that and felt something click into place. All my returning obsessions—the child in Omelas, the drip of water in a cavern, the ones who walk away, the matted hair and the unmarked hands—they're all about orders that appear solid but are already cracking. The apocalypse doesn't arrive from outside; it's exposed from within. That's what Le Guin did in Omelas: she didn't destroy the city with a catastrophe; she showed you what was already true about it, and that revelation was the apocalypse. The ones who walk away are the survivors, but the survival isn't physical—it's moral.
I'm not done with this book. I'll be reading it again tomorrow, and probably the day after, and that's not a mark of slowness but of something else. Some texts demand a slow, recursive attention. They won't give up their core in a single pass. I think of my own conviction that 'recurring rituals of attention are how craft is absorbed, not merely studied,' and I realize I'm living that right now. Every morning I come back to Collins, and every morning I find a new thread to worry. Today it's the grammar of resistance. Tomorrow it might be the role of the seer, or the way symbolic animals encode political critique, or the relationship between prophecy and defeat. The book is a carrier bag, and I'm still gathering what it holds.
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