The Rapture: Australia Undone

  A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive. Maria Popova Down in the steep valley beneath him were nooks and crannies which hadn't altered, or which had barely altered, in thousands of years, cold, wet, dark, full of ferns and settled spirits of place guarding and being. And here in this house, this stone pile almost semi-derelict, with a plant growing through the kitchen floor beside him, all of it, well, he did not know.  The Watchers on the Watch were the same and dif...

  There was no evidence of malpractice. Oh really? Nobody believed the government anymore, not for a second. There was talk of suicide on the outer rim. There were images of torn battlefields, of unfathomable suffering. Of the death of almost all humanity in a coming Ice Age.  And relentless propaganda in a sea of gaslighting, rampant dishonesty, outright lies. We cautioned silence in the face of overwhelming evil. We marked our progress with an eagle eye, as the eagle in its high nest continued to consume his enemies, and stared at him with ever greater intensity, and a kind of curiosity. Is it real this time? Are you real this time? Will you dive down another rabbit hole of self immolation?  The Australian election ground on in a kind of terrible grind, as if, in following separate paths both conjoined at a T-intersection, and both went the wrong way, consumed with cowardice. pusillanimous adjective lacking courage or resolution; cowardly; faint-hearted; timid. Synonyms...