Do not expect too much of the end of the world

“Do not expect too much of the end of the world” is an epigraph that sets a dry, cautionary register for the novel’s treatment of historical upheaval. Rather than promising that crisis will deliver a final truth, it counsels against expecting the end of an era to resolve the uncertainties of living in history.

Source and Placement

The sentence is attributed to Stanislaw J. Lee and identified as coming from Aforyzmy. Fraszki, published in Krakow by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 1977, in “Mysli nieuczesane.” Its placement before the chapter’s reflections on generational experience makes it a threshold statement: the reader encounters a warning against grand expectations before hearing how the narrator makes sense of his own historical moment.

Historical Dislocation

The surrounding passage compares entering university a year or two after 1968 to being admitted to the Academic de Saint-Cyr in 1793. In either case, the comparison makes a birth date feel like a mistake: the individual arrives after a rupture and inherits a world whose terms have changed. Jacopo Belbo counters the narrator’s sense of being born under the wrong sign by arguing that every generation experiences this misalignment. The epigraph’s restraint fits that account. A historical break may alter the conditions of life without providing a clean beginning or a privileged vantage point from which the past becomes fully intelligible.

Rewriting the Horoscope

The narrator says that living properly requires rewriting one’s horoscope day by day. The image turns historical uncertainty into an ongoing task of interpretation: no single upheaval settles a person’s relation to the times. Read beside the epigraph, that daily revision resists both fatalism and the hope that an epochal ending will supply a final explanation. The sentence thus introduces a tension between the scale of catastrophe and the limited, continuing work of making sense of one’s life.