Nothing exceeds like excess

I might be updating the Toynbee simulation again. I'm listening to some Baroque music. Just general generic baroque, I assume. One of those five hour youtube compilations.

Not sure when I last mentioned that I have long thought that Bach, the baroquest baroque you can get, his music was music as Husserlian phenomenology. Whenever I've actually said that or written it a squirrel appears, because even if someone appreciates Bach there is zero chance that person also appreciates phenomenology. So, there's the squirrel.

Back to Toynbee. If Shakespeare's essentially Godless plays circa 1600 indicate a Westen society already well into its breakdown, then maybe it's the French Revolution in 1789 that marks the disintegration and that's no longer Western society after that. And we've been in an Interregnum since then, with the novel as the heroic literature of that struggle with going nowhere. That would mean that modernity is just a wasteland. Stare at a page full of "black Friday" deals on amazon and tell me what you see.

"Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many." — T.S. Eliot

By the time we get to the shattering blow of World War One, we're bouncing the rubble and WWII is more of that and worse, ending up with nuclear weapons and another great forgetting. Every time you turn around the past hundred and ten years, there's a massive war or a genocide, and it can't even be captured by dystopian fiction. No one would read books as ugly as reality. No escape there.