That specifically describes mankind as surviving, even under the most pessimistic scenario. Hence it must be the death of civilization, rather than the extinction of mankind.

You’re logically correct of course. And I don’t doubt that both the logical absurdity and some dry humor were intentional. Yoknapatawpha County is a vastly more complicated place than even Middle Earth, and Faulkner wasn’t overjoyed about the publicity attendant with the Nobel award.

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

That specifically describes mankind as surviving, even under the most pessimistic scenario. Hence it must be the death of civilization, rather than the extinction of mankind.

Thanks for the background from the novel. However, every word “Ding dong of doom” is poisoned by their modern usages. It’s no discredit to him, of course… but I cannot help but chuckle.

“The last dingdong of doom” has to be the silliest way to express the end of civilization that I have ever heard.

It’s the end of mankind, not just civilization.

“Doom” was the name adopted by Faulkner’s character Ikkemotubbe, a Chickasaw Indian chief appearing in The Sound and the Fury, among other stories and novels.

“Ding dong” is the sound of a clock chiming. Faulkner’s suicidally doomed character Quentin Compson in the same novel awoke every morning to the sound of the chimes in the Harvard belltower, and became suicidally obsessed with clocks and time.