"The perplexing fact about lives given over to the satisfaction of ordinary material needs is that they seem capable of generating their own self-validation..The terror of life, for Augustinians, was that it is so inexplicably endurable."

--Ignatieff.

If that is true then the measure of our fallen state is that we are simply not aware of what we lack. We do not comprehend the chasm that has opened up before us and merrily hurtle toward it because movement, no matter to what end or in which direction, is expressive of our will.

We gorge ourselves on pleasures, relinquishing the possibility of joy or composure or repose. Does the word 'excess' still exist in our vocabulary?

There is a tendency to see our situation as unique. We either think that we stand at the culmination of a long drawn-out historical process of an epic struggle against superstition and theological mystification; or we see ourselves as frivolously or seriously living out humankind's last act. 

By some kind of great miracle human intelligence has finally freed itself from thinking about 'other worlds' and can concentrate on the more practical consideration of improving people's lives-even if only incrementally- here on earth, right now. On the other hand, after centuries of war and barbarity that very same intelligence lies in tatters, as does our confidence in any long-term project. There is no poetry after Auschwitz. Itself, that has become a slogan, an empty gesture! 

And so we conclude that it was that very same intelligence that tricked and trapped us when it was life, life all along that what we wanted. Sovereign becoming, and don't tarry to try and make sense of it. Go with the flow, don't tie the fragments together because nothing an be reassembled at this late stage in the day/game. Is it anything but a game or a stage and, if so, what part to play but that of the clown?

"Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space."

--Russell.

It is precisely that way of seeing, thinking, reflecting and remembering that seems unavailable to us today. What resources can we call upon then?