Disappearing world

In dark times what is there to do but wait it out, remain small, unknown.

~
In dark times what is there to do but wait it out, remain small, silent, unknown? A time for gathering, for re-assessing, for traveling (not-traveling) on that faded path least taken. Like the monks from a thousand years ago, walking in the night, knee-high in the swamps, through the howling winds, wasted landscapes, to keep the word in the world, to leave a small door open for others, to imagine a return, a particular set of images that you always carry with you, deep within, like a place of refuge, the calmness of mid-morning, a verandah at the back of the house, full of late afternoon sunshine and the small lemon tree in the long grass...  

'May I hope that this is the second volume of your Gnosis? At that, there entered into my soul too, still rent by the Unspeakable I had just learnt about in my erstwhile home-the fate of my mother and the untold others-for the first time something like peace again: at beholding the constancy of thought and loving interest across the ruin of a world. Suddenly I knew: one can resume and continue that for which one needs faith in man.'
--Hans Jonas.

The 'constancy of thought and loving interest'. This sounds incredibly old-fashioned to our ears since it recalls a former time when we could talk and think about the virtues, and in particular a virtue like constancy. An unswerving ability to keep your life steady, to maintain balance throughout all the various vicissitudes of life. But not simply a disposition or a feeling, more a way of life, a way of being in the world- and since the virtues are profoundly intertwined with one another constancy is related to, but not the same thing as, courage, patience, sobriety, judgement...

To keep pace with yourself (not with the times). To find your groove, let what was inessential fall away. What we lose most of all in dark times is a proper sense of time. To think that our lives were once more attuned to the passing of the seasons, the rhythms of the earth. In a disappearing world, at the end of times, there is no space left. 

There is the inescapable human tragedy of the "migrant crisis"-the individual stories (or, more precisely, the dry accounts of nameless deaths), the more general story of despair and the unraveling of settled lives-but there is also the sense that all of this is a foreboding of some looming, imminent catastrophe just over the horizon. Not, for sure, a catastrophe in the sense of a single event but more as a sign of the fact that human beings are exhausted (G. Steiner writes, some would say prophetically, that there are no more beginnings). A sign, then, of the times, the shadow, we live under today.

In an age of the "verified self" (and what a mockery it is to think that we are still in any substantial way free) there is a border post set up along any and every road. We acquiesce to the demands because, hey, there's nothing to hide anyway. When I got to Oakland there was no Oakland there-and no 'I' either. D.H.L. once wrote (if memory serves me correctly) that there would be a time when human beings would not be able to stand the odour of other human beings. A sheer animal distrust of others, the avoidance of their gaze, signals the disappearance of the world but since the human imagination cannot exist in a vacuum it creates another world, an underworld. 

Look me in the eye kid and tell me if you are who you say you are. 
Purpose of visit? 
Last port?  
Duration of stay?
Have you suffered..

Sign and Declare, so help you God.