I've finished sorting out my Pompeii-Vesuvius photos more or less, and I think that this new way of blogging and uploading is more conductive to my writing process. It's easier to write less for more, and to concentrate my train of thought on a relatively low number of entries, rather than spreading it out thin, like butter on too much toast. I'm reminded of that Spanish phrase.. how did it go? Todo por nada. Yesterday I said to Lital that you want different things at different stages of your life. That is true to an extent. I've always wanted to travel, but I think my priorities for travelling have shifted slightly since. Not in a bad way, but I'm not the person I once was, and as such, the activities I enjoy have changed to accommodate whom I am.
Completely unrelated (or maybe not), but I just finished reading an extremely coherent short essay that articulates my own thoughts on what I like to call 'the system', and why I run away from it periodically:
Work continues because the class with the money and power to rule has made sure it does. To them the future of 3-day weeks and long weekends that was promised in my childhood was a threat: not only would it leave millions of the underclass (and to the ruling class everyone else was under-) with nothing to do except find out that their lives of work had been an unnecessary forced serfdom, it would leave the rulers themselves with time on their hands to realize the falsity of the world they and their ancestors had created to ward off the knowledge of humanity's pointlessness.
Religion has always been one of the weapons of rule, but most religions descend from pre-scientific ages, whose gap-filling theologies would have been abandoned as nonsense centuries ago if our rulers hadn't needed for their own safety - and functional sanity - to keep them going. As the Enlightenment left religion shaking in its foundations and its rich high priests shaking in their shoes, the Protestant ethos in particular - already weakened by being crucially severed from the power at the top, the papacy supposed to link Xianity directly with its god - had to invent something else to keep the underclasses too busy to think for themselves. Protestantism's part-emancipation of the underlings from the priesthood had already made the developing Protestant work-ethic a necessary stopgap for the priesthood's secular brethren in national government, and in the most secularly priested of all countries, the England passed down from Henry VIII, the upper and would-be upper classes found a solution in privatisation of public - 'common' - land. This left the underclasses that had formerly lived on their own farming and foraging - and spent the time between planting and harvesting in virtual realities of beer and football and folk-culture, which looked to their frightened ex-lords like idleness - with no way of keeping themselves and their dependents except by working on the land again; but this time it was on land that was no longer theirs but had been converted by the gentry and aristocracy, who had stolen it by erecting fences round it, into private pasture and pleasure-gardens. Its former owners had now to learn to work not directly to produce food and shelter but in the forms of alienated labour devised by their employers, which were paid for with money to buy what they would formerly have raised for themselves.
A general loss of faith, certainty and purpose in the Enlightenment was followed naturally by the agrarian and industrial revolutions, which carried the underclass farther away from the land and into the cities forming round manufacturing industries - these being largely financed by big landowners, seeking new ideas for the religion of money-making that had taken the place of their own sense of a purpose in faith. So the desperate ferocity of doubts, religious revivals, labour-movements and capitalism that characterize the C19th are interrelated, and their current form is as YNH describes. It's a terrifying history of exploitation, greed and fear, and the latest developments show the haves and havenots locked in a continuing diversionary battle whose real object is their own repressed dread of the vacuum in themselves. Of course the only solution is truth - and, of course, that has recently been specifically recognized as the main enemy. (source)Back to Pompeii.
The Temple of Apollo.
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