Tuesday Dementia

The Last Stop Is Not the End of the Line

Why does one arise so blasted early, why does the mind in the wee hours seize the moment to obsess? And that on matters not even the deranged intellect can resolve, much less in this darkness when only Tōshō is open. Why? Ah, this morning’s delanceyplace.com extract is from Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. America, where mental restlessness is pandemic. Except in the Bible Belt, where Ussher reigns and the mind is checked at the door.

This coffee is perfect for the sunrise watch: Trader Joe’s 100% Kona, rich and smooth, whole beans ground in my Coffeemaker Extraordinaire, but what’s that hot thing discomforting my left kidney? Ah: laptop recharger transformer box dissipating heat: science.

Sony +32.0, Toyota down 25 and I can buy or sell from this green sofa if so moved, General Washington would be incredulous. He lived as the Enlightenment set and the Second Great Awakening dawned mixing, Menand asserts, “popular superstition and folk therapeutics with traditional Christian mythology.” 

Actually, we Christians deny being mythological, don’t we.

But my favorite Menand line as a now-and-then electronics fanatic, “the last blast of supernaturalism before science superseded theology as the dominant discourse in American intellectual life.” 

There is an American intellectual life? Intriguing assertion, Louis. Why? Why has “science superseded theology”? While theologians detrain at the firmament and gaze down upon creation, Hubble strikes out for the edge of the universe, visualizes the multiverse, and never looks back.

Next stop, the Big Bang. Is that the end of the line? Depends on who’s speaking (singing if Aslan got there first). 

Imagination without borders is what got us banned from Eden in The Beginning.

It the reader fails to understand, we must read and know different things, eh? I know nothing. Nothing. 

Nevertheless, RSF&PTL. 

Superstition, therapeutics, mythology, or faith?   

TW+