Desultor

The Happy Tutor et al. have been having some fun lately riffing on the Rapture, thinking about what life’ll be like for us poor saps who’ll be, as LaHaye & Jenkins have it, “left behind”. He keeps using phrases like “got Raptured” or “be Raptured”, which just crack me up, I don’t know why. Interestingly, “be raptured” seems to be in common use by people who take the notion seriously, while “get raptured” seems to have a bit of mocking force to it.

This passage, from Oliver Lawson Dick’s introduction to his edition of John Aubrey’s “Brief Lives”, seems germane somehow. He’s talking about after Cromwell got the boot (and more Puritans started emigrating to places like Massachusetts)…

Aubrey grew quite lyrical over the King’s restoration, when it was accomplished, and it was left to Anthony Wood to see to the ugly side of the business. The divines hurriedly putting on “the most prelaticall garbe that could be” did not escape his jaundiced eye and he watched with scorn while those “that bore the faces of demure Saints, would now and then put out a wanton (in plaine terms, a baudy) expression, and, as occasion served, a pretty little Oath.” But even he had to admit that “after the King came in I never heard of any that were trouled in conscience or that hung himself, as in Oliver’s time, when nothing but praying and preaching was used.” For there was no doubt that life under the Commonwealth had been an appalling strain; and Aubrey says in his life of Wenceslas Hollar, I remember he told me that when he first came into England (which was a serene time of Peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his return, he found the Countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightful, as if bewitched.

If life after the Rapture is about swearing a lot and being cheerful, then I’m ready for the Rapture. Bring it on.

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