AN ILLUSORY PARADISE LOST

Innocence is a fleeting thing. It can last to age twelve at best. But in all but modern times it will have lasted only until seven, or eight at the most.

Life was harder and harder the further back in time you go. Life was cheap and inconsequential. A women might have five or six children with only two or three surviving. Those who survived worked hard from seven or eight all the way through, almost to their death beds. There was no room for innocence, except for those first few years of life. Toil in the fields had to be endured, an income whether of product or coinage had to be earned.

Innocence beyond a certain limit was unaffordable.

There was very little of it at all until the late 1920s when life became a little less hard. That is if you survived the First World War. Life was still about work and children. There were no holidays, or if there were they were few. You believed what you were told or pretended to, you toiled all week and went to church on Sunday. This was life and it was mostly hard. Wives were at home and husbands were at work or getting drunk in many cases. Children arrived through a form of legalized rape, one after the other. Whether they survived or not was a matter of economics, little more.

It has only been in the modern ages that we are familiar with that gentile codes of conduct became widespread for any but the moneyed classes. Previous to this time there was an unbridgeable gulf between those who considered themselves a class above and those of the common herd.

Etiquette began to spread. The dos and don’ts we are familiar with now. Manners and consideration for others. Taking care not to offend. Minding your ‘p’s’ and ‘q’s’. Deference where it was due.

The point of this text is that this is all now ending. All these mores are disappearing as we travel back to the much longer history of random responses and a complete abandonment of the principle of innocence. The formalities of caring what others feel and acting accordingly, of being polite, attentive and at all interested are boring, unnatural and uncool to the young.

Simultaneously the workplace is becoming a harsh lesson in the dog-eat-dog world to come. No sympathy is spared. You are expected to perform, to deliver. If not you must depart and somehow fend for yourself. No gold watch for you. Perhaps a quick showing of the door after a cold, gimlet-eyed goodbye. A farewell with no sign of anyone wishing you to fare well within it.

On the street you are one of many competitors in the race to furnish an apartment in minimalist style by elbowing others out of the way while you exert your office or boardroom machinations seeking your self-interest.

Perhaps you will find a business partner to share your life and children with, all like expensive toys or pets, groomed to impress, mandated to learn well and be gone from the domain as soon as possible.

Was there a time when we lived in a community of warmth? Only for the lucky few. Small communities were places where curtain twitching and mean-minded gossip prevailed, where you had to keep up appearances or face the consequences of exclusion.

The rich eye each other with calculator minds generating endless rolls of statistical analyses and inventories. The church needs new stained-glass windows to keep up appearances & fake-smiling ladies pretend warmth to gather as many notes as possible in their coffers.

The bankers, the industrialists, the tradesmen, the craftsmen, the laborers... all in their casts and mental caskets, all dominated by Wall Street in the end, all craven in the face of the threats from above, from the Wall Street speculators with their metallic brains. The Masters of the Universe in their realm of heart-rending ice.

And it all works smooth as silk when times are good. The community of symbiosis all smile in unison nodding in timely fashion and always very correctly while all appears well and no disturbing element intervenes.

However all this is coming to an end, thoroughly unstuck and collapsing. Old verities are no more. Eyes begin to glaze over in fear, the laughs are not so hearty, the smiles not as quick to appear.

Covid-19 is working its undermining medicine across every class but the topmost one of the super-rich. The soft cushions of affluence are rapidly losing their ability to comfort and keep warm, safe from the howling gales approaching. Money is flying out from bank accounts like confetti. Smiling eyes are gathering lines that threaten to become permanent frowns.

Inexorably the comfortable classes are drawn down to depths they are either totally unfamiliar with or which they thought were lost in the past they left far behind them. Desperately frightening futures of loss, cold stares and empty dreams begin to rise before them. An animal panic threatens to engulf them.

Manners maintained easily begin to reveal crocks in composure. Friends seem distant, gazes averted as they excuse themselves and leave. Wives and husbands withdraw into self-doubt. Children over twelve begin to act badly, worse than ever before. Outside strange sound greet the ear of discord. Flames flicker in the distance and begin to approach. Sirens begin to wail.

At the topmost height the cushioned elites make their plans with eyes now colder by far that when the modern era began, losing confidence in the matrix of others’ work that provided every service to them.

Innocence is a concept losing its allure in the panic engendered simply to survive. It is retreating like a virgin ghost in a long lost dream. Priests and pastors chase it but fail to entice it back, the theater stage she once glided beautifully upon is now all jagged splinters.

We retreat to arm ourselves, defending ourselves from all strangers, watchful of their every move.

In just a short few decades the parade of endless beauty, comfort and apparent stability came and went. Hopes were kindled and nurtured for so few decades before all was to be snuffed out. Bright eyes dulled. The colorful facade built lovingly round our lives was ripped down.

Innocence took flight to further and further reaches as the final curtain dropped on that stage of our lives. A chill swept through humanity.

The illusory paradise we had assumed was here to stay... was now irrevocably lost.  

\O/

Postscript.

The darkness of the soul across much of the world was now complete.

A few however, who had sought to preserve their being from the darkness and retained their independence of insight into the whys and wherefores involved had long perceived a remaining soft light shining from the east.

They now moved body and soul, with all the will they could organize, toward it...