"Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles shall devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us."
Thomas Nashe,
A Litany In Time of Plague
"Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
to reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."
John Milton, Paradise Lost
"Foolishness has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; they did not believe in plagues."
Albert Camus
Stocks were for the most part higher.
Gold and silver were knocked back down.
The Dollar drifted a bit higher.
We are in one of those periods of deep denial, of business as usual.
The scams of yesterday and the brute assertion of our own reality is an old habit that remains.
It might even be safe to say that this has been our default approach to life for some time now.
It is certainly the style of choice for a good part of the public, and their thought leaders and talking heads.
I have never thought I would see so many people just throwing themselves away.
The amazement at the willful blindness reminds me of the astonishment at folly of the German people in the letters that Bonhoeffer wrote from prison.
We have no shame, no sense of proportion or our own place in our selfishness and mad defiance.
And we do it because, in the short term, we can.
Have a pleasant evening.
