I wrote before about a round table discussion of a few days ago. Six of us were asked to explore dimensions of our experience that troubled us, which cause a feeling of dread. A few days have passed. I continue to remember a passionate statement made there by a good friend that humankind is bound to face a hundred years, perhaps two hundred years of severe suffering. He observed that humans need a constraint of severe circumstances to learn lessons that otherwise we have failed to learn.

That we are a suffering species, a species perpetually seeking remedies, consolations for our unease, or better dis-ease, seems obvious to me. In our time, the cybernetic age, – innovation, the will to monetize every possible segment of shelter, of nourishment, of education, of emotional engagement, of amusement is the form which this widespread conviction that reality is at the disposal of homo sapiens happens to take.

I shiver when I think about the world, — this infinite variety of living things, from the invisible sub-cellular entities, which together make up the biome of another life-form of stunning complexity, which in turn, etc., etc.. You get the idea. That all of “this” concatenated earth-habitat is about me, or about us – is a dark, sardonic thought indeed.

Truth is of endless variety, is fluid. Truth is not solely, and not simply about us.

Up to the present time
errors have been the power
most fruitful in consolations:

we now expect the same effects
from accepted truths,
and we have been waiting
rather too long for them.

What if these truths
could not give us this consolation
we are looking for?

Would that be an argument
against them?

What
have these truths
in common
with the sick condition
of suffering and degenerate
humankind
that they should
be useful to them?

It is, of course,
no proof against the truth of a plant
when it is clearly established
that it does not
contribute in any way
to the recovery
of sick people.

Formerly, however,
people were so convinced
that humankind was
the ultimate end of nature
that they believed
that knowledge
could reveal nothing
that was
not beneficial and useful
to man
—nay,
there could not,
should not be,
any other things in existence…

—Even the Greek gods
were unable to administer consolation;
and when at length
the entire Greek world fell ill,
this was a reason for the destruction
of such gods.

The Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 424