Has the profane so overtaken the sacred that there is no hope to be found?
Raising our heads from our daily business a moment, it seems to us that the world is so broken, and humanity’s capability to organise its own affairs is in such a state of disrepair, that we scrabble for hope.
We know that searching for it within ourselves is a thankless task: we are either driven automatons, the captives of accident, chance and the selfish gene; or else, we are as a dark festering pit, damned beyond redemption, beyond any hope of helping ourselves to climb out of the morass.
Waves of the nameless dread may seen to overcome us: not only of our own inevitable mortality – the light being snuffed out – but that of our civilisation, too – helplessly adrift, consigned to watch in terrified resignation as the waterfall comes ever nearer.
If there is no solace to be found within, and no salvation to be found in each other, may we think of turning to a saviour larger and more powerful than us?
Yet we know, in our heart of hearts, that there is no light to be found there either. That great ‘Poet Laureate of death’, Philip Larkin, put it so well, surely, in his poem ‘Aubade’:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
So we know, too, that we could hardly invest our hopes for a cure to our existential angst with ‘tricks’ and ‘pretence’, in a dusty mannequin – a moth-eaten brocade – whose time it seems has surely gone – and good riddance!
Far from bringing home the golden fleece of personal sovereignty, has it come to this, that one by one the threads of any hope and trust in the future are fraying – and snapping, if there were any left at all?