Why is it that, as we are beset within a technological garden of machines, anticipating and catering to every nook and crevice of our collective desires, where the evolution of specific knowledge increases exponentially in an accelerating rhythm heretofore unknown in the Ages of Men, all indices point towards an implacable decline into barbarism? A society, yea, a civilization that covets one shimmering trinket after another, that can calculate into infinity the catalogue of the entire earth as a commodity, that speeds farther and faster, and yet goes nowhere -- is coming to the end of its existential tether. It does not require a prophet to perform this grotesque augury, as grey steel shoots into the sky to contain the bodies of men whose spirits wither and languish: flushed with the inheritance of their own brutish proclivities.

The maddened hunt for ecstasy cycles into delusion. We see farther but less clearly. We act, but do so with a ponderous impotence, for we do not know for whence we are bound. Our reliance upon dead mechanics has kindled a hunger that the world is increasingly unable to satisfy; and our children, who know nothing other than the instrumental novelties that divert and displace the small inner voice, grow inexorably duller -- some becoming more beast than human as they thrash against nature.

Once, in a time nearly forgotten, before the great crescendo of tumult that permeates and crowds out the heavens, before the great lights and rapid movements, before we dared to fashion a lifeless mechanism in the image of Man, one knew that the night was the time to become small, and in the velvet canopy of stars, it was possible to reflect upon thoughts heavier than the universe -- meditations that can be scarcely uttered in the dissonant maelstrom. Men's hands have become hooks and levers to scrape and ratchet the world with a virtuosity that would stun simpler but wiser ages, but in our pride we are retarded orphans to proportion and perspective.

In truth, our machines have silently become our masters: rendering us helpless and full of blinking emptiness until they dutifully fill our senses with a numberless array of pallid delights. Know this: It is time to clear the scales from our minds and listen for the sound of tumbling columns. The earth is falling and no Golden Age shall ever proceed from our failing hand. By our own addled choices we are left with only entropy and disillusion -- a fate that no veneer of silicon or metal can console our wavering hearts therein, as we descend down that evolutionary ladder approaching absolute zero.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com and followed at www.stubbornthings.org.