One day Henny Penny was pecking corn in the farmyard, when suddenly an acorn fell from the tree above and hit her on the head. ‘Oh dear,’ thought Henny Penny, ‘the sky is falling down! I must go and tell the king!’
– Henny Penny, European folk tale
It is amazing, Clive, how well you write, how easily it seems to come to you, and how widely you’ve read. Equally amazing is the impression your reading has left on you and the conclusion you draw from it: The Abolition of Man.
Little use in reasoning with you, as that would be to fall prey to what you seem most to fear, reason. It takes all the fun out of things. The dappled light falling through the forest trees turns out not, under the cold eye of reason, to be your “God light”; it is photons striking your retinas in the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that you are able to apprehend. No magic in that at all, which is, to you, the problem.
You prefer to impute beauty to the hawk while ignoring the agony of its prey. And who can blame you? Who could live comfortably in Lucretius’s Natura, with its cold mechanics? Better the Tao, with all its wrath and caprice. Better “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” than “the coldest of cold prisons” that is this disenchanted age.
You may well be right in saying, “To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” It’s certainly an understandable lament, so far have this species’ dark arts taken it. The sky, as it happens, has fallen under the relentless gaze of Fortuna.
You would not be the first to mind its evanescence.