paranoia

[gary webb]

I love Ovid's riff on this in the Metamorphoses, the succession of ages
each typifying a particular stage of degeneracy:

The Golden Age- " There was no fear or punishment: there were no
threatening words to be read, fixed in bronze, no crowd of suppliants
fearing the judge’s face: they lived safely without protection (Bk I:
80-112)."

to the Bronze Age, where the last line is particularly good- "Piety was
dead, and virgin Astraea, last of all the immortals to depart, herself
abandoned the blood-drenched earth (Bk 1: 125-150)."

In case any one is interested:
http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph.htm

These stages seem to have crept into the modern era. In Smollett's Don
Quixote (Volume I, Book II pg. 111) : "There was no fraud, no deceit, no
malice intermixed with plain-dealing truth: justice then, kept within her
proper bounds, undisturbed and unbiased by interest or favour, which now
impair, confound, and persecute her so much: law was not then, centered in
the arbitrary bosom of the judge, for, at that time, there was neither
cause nor contest."





On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 1:41 PM Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I opine with Feuerbach that humans cannot tolerate their own goodness, so
> they package it up into a deity or so and project outward into the heavens,
> or into the powerful forces of the Earth. It is the same with the essential
> human incapacity for tolerating our evil. Nietzsche tried to save the day,
> but few humans had ears with which to hear.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>