For much of our lives we are not living them but going through the motions like we were in a waking dream. Life, life as a routine: numb, orderly, devoid of passion, joy and serious thought, serious emotion, conformist and ever fearful. Our natural situation in the world is to lose connection to the essential by all the dead routines of this neutral, materialist Western society. (In the premodern times the same disconnection was accomplished by horrible physical want, by irrational and unjust creeds and hierarchies, false collective identities).
Our natural situation is not to be connected - but we can be, even here, we can have shorter or longer moments in this life: love, art, friendship, pursuit of understanding; my personal values, my escapes to seriousness. How easily lost in this word, how universally longed for: for our intentions really are intangible and sweet, and even if in history our typical state is this disconnectness, we still can escape it, even here, and can have, no matter how unrealistically, the end of history as our fundamental goal: the liberation of our better selves into timelessness, the liberation of our seriousness and warmth, our love and sympathy.
