Into the Sun

It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town–both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date–when a “great message,” telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an “accident in the gravitational system.” Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: it’s the end of the world, though one hardly notices it, yet … “Thus all life will come to an end. The heat will rise. It will be excruciating for all living things … And yet nothing is visible for the moment.”

For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine harvest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then to black-red. First comes denial: “The news is from America, you know what that means.” Then come first farewells: counting and naming beloved things–the rectangular meadows, the grapes on the vines, the lake. In its beauty the world is saying, “Look at me,” before it ends.

The prophetic Into the Sun vividly voices the initial disbelief, the rejection of the increasingly obvious facts, and the suppression of the gnawing doubts. Ramuz describes denial, fear, melancholy, despair, reckless abandon, and a swift slide into anarchy. Everyone seeks relief in the lake while the sun drinks it up “as if through a straw.” Ramuz’s terrifyingly gripping scenario of a burning planet and the demise of humankind–now so fatefully on our horizon–is a stirring blast from the past, a truly hair-raising tour de force.