In the beginning humans lived as members of small communities that fought, played, and made love together. It wasn’t all comfortable, but it was fulfilling, and it was free. Then a new method of controlling the earth was discovered, and some humans formed a mythology that, like a disease, began eating away at all the beauty and freedom in the world.
The humans began to think that somehow, with enough technology, they could escape the inescapable elements of human existence, the fundamental aspects of a human life. And yet, even now, on the bleeding edge of progress, fulfillment can still be found where it always was: in the laughter around a campfire, in a hard day’s work, or in the drawings of a child.
And progress—well, that has brought us the atomic bomb.
Nowadays, most people can sense that the old myths no longer hold their power. Modern life is characterized by a quiet uneasiness, a pervasive tip-of-the-tongue feeling, and right as we have found a way to articulate it, we are interrupted by an ad or a notification.
And left without space to tell new stories, we can do nothing but surround the old ones in quotation marks—an age of irony.
It’s time to let go of all that.
Hidden by our current irony is a deep, soul-wrenching despair. We have lost so much already. Undeniably, civilization has left some scars that will never heal.
But with that despair we can still find hope. There are new stories yet. A new life is pulsing underneath the slabs of city concrete, and it is waiting to be freed by a poet with a pickaxe.
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