Chapter 52
Like a Thief in the Night (cont)

At the millstone grinding

When human beings from around the globe, and from many different cultures, share a powerful and overwhelming intuition that a cataclysm is approaching, we are within our rights to ignore them. And when the voices of our distant ancestors, descending to us through myths and sacred architecture, speak to us of the physical obliteration of a great civilization in remote antiquity (and tell us that our own civilization is in jeopardy), we are entitled, if we wish, to stop our ears ...

So it was, the Bible says, in the antediluvian world: 'For in those days, before the Flood, people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands, right up to the moment that Noah went into the Ark, and they suspected nothing till the flood came and swept all away.'

In the same manner it has been prophesied that the next global destruction will fall upon us suddenly 'at an hour we do not suspect, like lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west ... The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken ... Then of two men in the fields, one is taken, one left; and of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left ...'

What has happened before can happen again. What has been done before can be done again.

And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun ...