Snapshot
A mixture of satiety, boredom,
violence, and despair
which characterizes our mass society—
the impotence of well-fed bodies
with empty and lost minds.
The obsession with lust
and with violent erratic forms of sex.
Abstraction,
confusion,
pseudo passion—
fabricated in the imagination
and centered on fantasies
Collect us together,
give us a leader that
fits into the pattern
of our fantasies
and knots our dream images
into a psychosis—
the whole thing comes
alive in destruction.
Yet even this hate is impotent.
Life comes back all the stronger.
–excerpt Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander
by Thomas Merton
