Sublime

The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.

This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on pre-invasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly holidays—fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships,

the point is to recognise the anti-modernist ideological overlap between contemporary green back-to-the-land ideology and volkisch agrarian mystique, resulting from common romanticist origins that were deeply antipathetic toward the Enlightenment.

The aristocratic household preserves a good deal of Homer in life as well as in poetry. But the Homeric values no longer define the moral horizon, just as the household or kinship group are now part of a larger and very different unit. There are no more kings, even though many of the virtues of kingship are still held to be virtues.

Richard Powers