The end is nigh

Living in these Last Days, reading in these last pages...

It was rather ironic that I found myself so excited on entering the concluding pages of Vanhoozer's Is there a meaning in this text?, just at the prospect of finishing the book (after over a year of making my way through it), that I couldn't concentrate to take it in and had to take a break.

What is it about the prospect of the end that is so excitingly distractive? Why is it hard to engage well knowing that the end is nigh?

It seems that the Thessalonians had the same problem.

[The book's very good by the way. Well worth taking a year to read - I may well do it again sometime!]