Lapse and Collapse

This is a beautiful image, but I don't know whom to credit for it. My apologies.




I first fully understood the meaning of “lapse” when, one summer, I was reading Virgil’s Aeneid with the brilliant Wayne J. Holman. I was doing my best, but frankly, Latin was hard for me. There was, I think, a reference to the Greek myth of Daedelus and his son, who rose on fabricated wings secured with wax to escape their prison in Crete. Icarus, the son, flew too near the blazing rays of the Mediterranean sun, wishing to reach the sun’s chariot. But he fell -- lapsus est -- and drowned.

Collapse (con-lapsus), then, means “to fall together,” and that seems to be an appropriate word for what is happening now in our environment, but so slowly that our hummingbird senses cannot fully appreciate it.
Here in East Tennessee this summer, we have had “air quality alerts” on more days than we have not had such warnings. The air is not easily breathable, though of course we must breathe or die, so we gasp on. My friend AS must stay indoors because her asthma is irritated by the air. The sky is white, not blue, a sort of muddy white. There is a stickiness in the air. East Tennesseeans do nothing about it because they are too fractious to do anything together except, perhaps, collapse (except for Chattanoogans, who have somehow learned the art of cooperation; Knoxvillians keep “knoxing” their heads against each other for no discernible reason).

So a “lapse” is a momentary fall; you can recover from it if those around you remain standing. But a “collapse” is total, and there is no easy recovery from it because there is no one left standing to pull you back up.

An interesting (and fully documented) take on this topic appears in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” a book by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend it. At least, if we are walking into collapse, it would be good to have our eyes open while we do it.