There were no signs in the sky.
There was no fire, no cosmic earthquake, no voice descending from on high to announce the end. The world remained in its place, too stable, too obedient to its own laws. Precisely there, the problem began.
James Wilhelm realized, with a clarity that was almost painful, that the world was not moving toward destruction. The world was moving toward fulfillment.
He sat in his narrow study, surrounded by shelves of books that he no longer read to find answers, but to confirm something he already knew yet had not dared to formulate. Those books, histories of revolution, critiques of religion, phenomenology of consciousness, classical and modern metaphysics, no longer argued with one another. They repeated one another.
That repetition was not accidental. It was a symptom.
James named it, for the first time in his private notes that night, conceptual saturation. Not because ideas had run out, but because all ideas had reached their maximal form. History was still moving, but direction had disappeared.
He did not feel despair. That was what disturbed him most.
As an agnostic, James did not wait for God to descend from the sky. He also did not expel God from the world. That position, in the middle, gave him enough distance to observe without being involved, but also without cynicism. If God exists, he thought, then God must not be something accidental. He must be necessary. If He is not necessary, He does not deserve to be called the highest reality.
Yet what James witnessed was not the absence of God, but the absence of an outside.
The world no longer possessed anything that could oppose it from beyond itself. No transcendence remained as tension. Religions still stood, prayers were still uttered, but all of it moved within the same circle of meaning. God was invoked by many names, but what appeared was always an identical structure.
James wrote down a single sentence, then paused for a long time before continuing:
"The problem of the world is not the loss of God, but being too close to Him."
He closed the notebook slowly, as if afraid that by writing it too forcefully, something would collapse. But nothing collapsed. The world did not react. The world never reacts to understanding.
Outside the window, the city moved with an almost mechanical regularity. People worked, spoke, loved, argued, as if the future were still open. But James began to see something they did not: every choice seemed valid, yet none was truly alternative.
Freedom was still felt, and precisely there lay the tragedy. That freedom was real as experience, yet empty ontologically. No choice was capable of altering the structure of reality. No negation was strong enough to give birth to a new form.
At this point James felt, for the first time, what he would later understand as the weakness of the Absolute. Not a flaw, not a lack of power, but the price of perfection itself. When everything is encompassed, there is no longer any risk. When there is no risk, there is no longer any cosmic drama.
He realized that if reality is a totality that is fully actual, if what is called God is not a personal being who chooses, but the whole that is reflecting upon itself, then the end of the world will not come as catastrophe. It will come as rational silence.
And that silence, James began to understand, was far more terrifying than any fire.
He rose from his chair and looked at his own reflection in the window glass. There was no revelation there. No sign of election. Only a human being sufficiently conscious to understand that consciousness itself was reaching its limit.
James Wilhelm did not know whether he wanted this world to end.
But for the first time, he knew that the world could end,
not because it is destroyed,
but because it has fully become what it is.
And out there, without anyone realizing it, history continued to move toward a point at which it would no longer be needed.