When you stare upwards at the cathedrals of our age, you must remember that it’s all a lie. The falsehood that will be rewritten as truth in the age to come is a falsehood all the same. Though your eyes will most likely glide off their smooth surfaces to the grit and reality below, though you will most likely be unable to remember, you must try.

Every age has its deep-seated conceits. Are ours better because they are newer? There. That’s one.

Draw a picture of a 5-year-old boy and state in the title that he is a 76-year-old man. Which will the viewer believe? If I can see that the boy is five, why should I not believe it? There. That’s one. The artist may lie. The creator may deceive. The emperor may not be wearing any clothes.

Will you know?

My generation looks back on events only fifty years distant and marvel. Our parents’ parents were simpletons, we say, because they had a cold war, and because that cold war landed men on the moon, and because at the end of it all there was a void waiting to be filled. Someone had to create a new monster.

They did. It was easy. Here, this is a cathedral. There, those are the Turks. We are good. They are evil.

It’s all a lie. The scarlet spires of today are the hubris and manipulation of the past. We are them, in blue jeans, with iPods. The brief flourishings where men understood freedom have died out. You are slowly being starved to death while the architects of your hunger whisper that your belly is full.

Tags: ruminations