35. Even Reason itself is shot through with wild mystery. All the reasonable arguments have come to nothing; look at the history of your West, your politics and philosophy, your great civilization. It is not through more 'changing the world' that the world will be righted. To let the world alone, rather. Allow mystery its rightful place. The world is fine enough. But man must first recover his humility to accept a diminished place in it.
36. Allow the wave to bear you up — those more powerful forces than men — to you know not where. There is pleasure and ecstasy in submission. To give in to the divinities once again.
44. When God did not answer his prayer for fiat wealth God was no longer necessary. Then no more did wealthy men attribute their financial success to divinity, only to themselves. In capitalism, men became gods.
49. The wild chorus is never unsung. Let the last land primates go extinct. Then remove the birds from the air, the fish from the seas. Let them all go away. Let men go next. Yet the wild chorus sings on. At that dark hour, when all appears dead, what is first heard as silence becomes a roar.
70. The economies of scale have defeated all other forms of life. The hunt is no more. Each summer in Alaska the fishermen are less. The world has been limited to a single species and a single language, and finally a single currency and a single form of life. The forests and rivers and mountains and skies have been transformed into numbers in a bank account. With the continuing concentration of global wealth into the hands of an ever select few, the idea of conspiracy becomes ever more plausible.
73. Men have learned the language of generality. They no longer can speak specifically of village life. They speak of the global, the virtual. Mars is next, they say.
79. Still the wild chorus sings of places and local practices, so many hidden transcripts, perhaps each year more forgotten. It sings of animals gone and animals hidden; of gods deceased and gods in waiting. And so the wild chorus will one day sing of Reason and argument, of the great ideas of men long passed. This time as all the others shall pass. There can be no progress, my brothers, and that is a good thing.
Perhaps the gods themselves have up and downs?
ReplyDeleteI like this idea: With the continuing concentration of global wealth into the hands of an ever select few, the idea of conspiracy becomes ever more plausible. The more "wealth" is concentrated in the hands of few, the more abstract the idea of wealth becomes. Who needs to own 30 homes, when he only has 365 days in a year to enjoy them, with the management of them taking more and more of his time, he is now a slave to his fortune. The common man, his only struggle is to avoid the trappings of wealth and with any luck, be in a good position to participate in the eventual uprising and redistribution of wealth that would result.
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