Meditation on Civilization
We are embedded in the day to day. We tend not to notice the exquisite design all around us, the 
product of our progenitors sweat, intelligence and passion. Reflecting upon this past Thanksgiving holiday, feeling some awe at the memory of a well appointed dining table. In the pleasant company of family, children and grandchildren; it was a day dedicated to appreciation. Immediately to the right of my keyboard is a glass of dark red Cabernet Sauvignon. Another reminder, this time to my palate, that I am a big fan of civilization.
Another quote from Walter M. Miller Jr’s magisterial story.
Long ago during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the non-moral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.
—Canticle For Leibowitz page 133
