Graceful Work

"Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first."

"Shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works."

When are we Christians ever going to stop forgetting?

The Grace, the graciousness, hospitality, generosity, mercy - the sheer profligate abundance - of God: these things aren't substitutes of an outwardly virtuous life, or compensations for its absence. The grace of God doesn't let us "off the hook" of being virtuous. If anything (if I may be allowed to stretch a metaphor) it fastens the hooks on which we're hanging all the more securely to the Fisherman's line.

Grace is not what makes a good life unnecessary and redundant. Rather it is what makes such goodness as we have more graceful than grim; able to listen as well as speak; attentive rather than merely attention-seeking; forgiving and not just forgetting. Grace is what makes humane virtue not just a possibility, but an impregnability. And the way Grace makes our virtues impregnable is by planting itself beneath us, so to speak, and rooting us in the joy of God. As opposed to mounting itself high above us - as our own graceless, joyless virtue is so often apt to do - and then sneering and scowling at us.

Indeed it often helps for me to think of Divine grace as being the express opposite of anything "proud." And here I use the word as I believe it's most commonly used by the Hebrew poets and proverb-collectors: - to denote something boastful, vaunting, "high"-minded, and above all conscious of its greatness and exaltation. Whereas, far from being like those high-and-dry clouds which the "tree-tops" of our virtue can never reach, the graciousness of God is the one thing both lowly enough to be the soil of our good works, and fertile enough to push them upwards, to ever-greater, more inconceivable heights. Besides being the one ground secure enough to anchor that most unexpected of all trees, the Cross.

I'm not saying God's grace is the only soil of our human virtue. It is merely the one soil that isn't just so much dust, clay and ashes: the one ground, rain-sweet, alive with mist, and swarming with all manner of living things, that actually leaves us better on account of our virtue than we were before, and not worse. And I believe that's something far more than any mere human virtue has ever managed to do.

Speaking Redemption to Power (assuming any of us will listen)

Very few of us like to be told we’re power-hungry.

And yet I think most of us would agree that the application of something we call Power – whether in restraint of human beings, or in control of the non-human world – is “necessary.” In other words, the exercise of material power, in this material world of ours, is vital to the constitution of the visible human order as we know it. We simply couldn’t exist without it. And recent horrific events in Japan, and elsewhere, may have convinced some of us of a yet more radical imperative: namely, that we humans won’t continue to exist with dignity – to grow and prosper in this anything-but-human-friendly universe – without one unholy hell of a lot more material power. The implication of which seems to be that, if our long-term aim is to survive and prosper as a species, then the more power-hungry we get the better.

Even those of us, too, who believe that God created man, and that He created us for a purpose to which He holds us accountable, would most emphatically agree that God has allotted – or at least allowed – the human species a most impressive range and depth of material power. At least compared with the rest of the visible creation. Indeed, I think not a few of us modern Westerners, both theists and non-theists, might go even further. A few of us might argue that much or most of this power came to us humans by way of diligent self-application, with little or no interference, or perhaps even input, from God. And that therefore it might also be safe to assume that the great bulk of this material power, which we’ve acquired more or less through our own efforts, has also been left to our own discretion, to use or not use how and as we see fit.

I’m not saying our Age is utterly unique in this confidence. In every human era there have been people like the wilder optimists above-mentioned. People who believed that the power we’d acquired on our own was our own business, and that we should do as we liked with what was ours. And who were convinced that, so long as we were smart and decisive and “kickass” enough in our use of it, there was nothing to fear. Nothing major could conceivably go wrong.
 

It may be, too, that our age is no bolder than previous ones. We might even be less power-hungry, and less power-presumptuous. As proof one could cite, first of all, evidence throughout the globe of our ever more highly-strung ecological conscience. If that doesn’t make for scrupulosity in the use of power, what does? Secondly, there is the abundant hand-wringing and eye-gushing going on, in many parts of the US, over the abuses and excesses of human government. And of course we all know, from both hard experience and harsh propaganda, how human governments can be very unscrupulous, cruel and overbearing things.

And yet – to be quite honest – I don’t know. Surely governments aren’t the only human agencies known to manifest this particular degree of urgency in getting what they want? And do we really loathe them as much as we say we do, or wish we did? Observe how government continues to grow from one US administration to the next, for all our ridicule and contempt of politicians, and political process (or lack thereof), and government programs. So why do we nurture the very thing we despise? And then go on despising it? Is it only the arrogance and unresponsiveness of State power that offends us? Or could it be simply that governments, for all their usefulness to us, have never succeeded in properly earning our American respect? That they’ve never been entities productive enough to have earned the right to be cruel and overbearing? If, on the other hand, they learned to turn a profit, and compete for market share . . .

Meanwhile, awaiting that Blessed Day, we very carefully strain the “camel” of governmental abuses of power, even as we swallow gnats – of ever-increasing size – of power-abuse by other, non-governmental social agents. And we marvel at how, as private property becomes ever more complicated and politically-connected – and ever more invasive of, and inquisitive into, the private lives of those who do not own it – we need governments of ever-increasing size and complexity to protect that same property against counter-surveillance, and even sabotage. And thus the dog continues to chase, and occasionally even bites, its tail.
 

So I wonder if – for all our official distrust of government and/or solicitude for the environment – we aren’t in fact living in one of the Great Ages of power worship. And most particularly power in the form of control that can often seem – at least to those on its receiving end – to be cruel, overbearing, and even bullying. In this instance I mean chiefly the kind of control we exercise over creatures, both human and non-human, for the purpose of making them conform to certain pending developments, to which adaptation is deemed by their betters to be urgently necessary. Like for instance the exploding, “unstoppable” pace of automation of work and labor. Or the reversal of environmental ill effects that are often accelerated, or aggravated, by those same processes of automation (among many other factors). Talk about furnishing both problem and solution.
 

Right now, however, my concern is not with the effect of this control upon us lesser creatures, both human and non-human. It is with its effects upon the controllers. After all, they’re creatures with souls too, for all their superiority: and so presumably must also one day render account. My main question is whether the exercise of this sort of control is making its exercisers genuinely better than their human and subhuman inferiors, as opposed to merely making them appear to be better, or feel they are better. Contrary to the wisdom of the Marquis de Sade, you really don’t confirm your spiritual elevation over some more limited creature by bullying or torturing it. Or even, necessarily, by beating it thoughtlessly into submission. When, for example, when Man beats and slabs down, when he concretes and asphalts over, certain things belonging to what he conventionally terms nature, he doesn’t redeem “nature” from its Tennysonian bloodshed, waste and wickedness. Rather, he participates in it, however indirectly or unintentionally; he descends to its level. This participation, and this descent, are sometimes necessary, but there's no need to romanticize them; they are not what makes us human, or even what makes us better than the non-human. What makes Man human is not his ability to control or intimidate or terrorize what is beneath him. There are plenty of creatures “in nature” doing that sort of thing already – though maybe not quite so productively (or eco-disruptively) as dear old Adam. Man transcends nature – or more precisely, he becomes that in himself which was created to be more than nature – not by devouring the physical world, but by using it as God uses us: by loving its creatures, not as we’d all like to be loved (or rather worshiped), but as those creatures both need and ought to be loved. We humans are nursed and carried into the fullness of our human nature, not by “lording it over” the lesser beings of the animal and vegetable worlds, but by seeing them – or such of them as cross our paths – in something of the way our Maker sees both them and us. For our God sees every thing He makes not merely in relation to Himself, but also – mystery of mysteries! – in relation to itself. And that can sometimes mean seeing it not just when it is bustling and brazen and confident, but when it is alone and afraid. Not just when it’s busy gathering nuts, but also when it’s – what shall we say? – ruminative, or seemingly doing nothing? Above all, not only when that creature is rushing headlong down some path of calculated and “certain” future gain, but even when it is pausing to remember other things seemingly lost forever – as if from out of some unknown and irrecollectible Past – things the Loss of which no amount of the most calculated creaturely effort can ever make good.

To be sure, everything, and everyone, is meant to be useful; there is nothing that has been made that is not meant to be taken up into some purpose higher than itself. But the precondition of any creature’s Divine usefulness is that the exquisite things most natural to its joy – indeed most peculiar to its nature – should be nurtured and ennobled and made to grow straight, rather than twisted and stunted and suppressed. You’ll never appreciate, for example, somebody’s prospective gifts as a pianist, if your sole determination is that she should become an engineer. Neither will you make it easier to discern the peculiar strengths of a golden retriever when, on a property with large outdoor spaces, you insist on confining him to the house, and training him up to be a lapdog.
 

Nor am I saying that these considerations don’t need to be balanced by others. Above all, I’m not suggesting that our most innocent human-population needs may not sometimes require more asphalt and concrete – and not infrequently a good deal more of it. What I'm saying is that there are times when habits like these – or perhaps more accurately, the momentum following right behind them – can become not only necessary, but evilly so. Times when certain things happen, not because they really needed to happen in the way they did, or to the degree that they did, but mostly because of some big player’s needlessly bad attitudes or bad practices. “Hey, he’s on a POWER TRIP,” as some might excuse, or even exonerate, him. In essence the big player is behaving like a jerk, not because the market demands his jerkiness, but because the market is letting him get away with it. Of course it will eventually make him pay, but that could take decades – decades in which the rest of us must live and plan our lives. And yet unfortunately any attempt to correct the process "too soon" - and especially by government action - would be all but sure to make bad matters worse. And so we acquiesce in it for the time being, and if we are wise, pray and hope to do better next time. Fine. But must we applaud the jerk? or reprieve his debt sentence? or yet further subsidize him?

Finally, and I think worst of all (on account of our modern celebrations of what would otherwise be known as greed and power-lust), sometimes things happen in ways that are more evil than is, well, truly necessary. And so if, and when, certain habits of ours become more-than-necessary evils – as when we buy up good croplands only to build unpurchasable homes on them – we do well to recognize these habits for what they are, and not rhapsodize over them. (“Oh, but how could ANYONE have known? All the indicators pointed . . .”)

Indeed, I’m doubtful we can even afford our present levels of callousness, whether in our mismanagement of land, in our misdirection of customers’ assets and financial reserves, or in our misallocation of workers’ labor and skill and enthusiasm. And again, I’m talking here not just about those who got strung along in the subprime market, but about those who, without any clear plan or even shred of malice aforethought, found themselves doing the stringing. Were all those bright energetic young folks really fit for nothing better than to become bankers, loan officers, realtors? “It was their SOVEREIGN CHOICE!” you thunder. Yes, but surely this Best of All Previous Economies could have offered them better guidance? Or if nothing else, more varied and interesting incentives, and opportunities for self-realization? Who knows how many genuine talents were wasted – what a wealth of gifts and aspirations were stunted and crushed – by all those droves of people rushing headlong into the financial and real-estate sides of the boat? Until at length the entire ship of the economy capsized?
   

What I am suggesting is that there are some things we may need to do necessarily, and yet provisionally and regretfully, until such a time as better, more above-board, more borrower-educating (rather than borrower-weakening and -confusing) ways of turning a profit can be found. And here, sadly enough, is where I fear you may have lost all patience with me. “Look, for the last time: Growth is founded on confidence, NOT PESSIMISM!” Yes, but if we repose our hopes on hollow and deceptive things our growth will be no less hollow and deceptive. And in any case, surely such “pessimism” is a good sight better than pretending Heaven’s just around the corner, and that we’re bringing it nearer with each skyrocketing price of shoddily-built homes on land where once we grew corn and beets?

We all know what it is to be foolishly – and yet arrogantly and dismissively – overconfident. And it may be that some of our most foolish habits, attitudes, expectations are inevitable. But once again, we don’t make them less foolish, or less destructive, by reveling in them – or worse, by celebrating the drive, the bold, ruthless “vision” that made them possible. They belong to that growing list of unfortunate things made necessary – or inevitable – by certain exigencies of our fallen nature (of which greed and its accompanying lust for power are but two). Unfortunate things, I say again. You know, like human government. And human competition.

In a Handbasket

Say, is it my usual over-active imagination? - or hypersensitivity? Or are more of today's people, in their various busy, hard-pressed movements about the Room of Life, shifting more and more to that particular gear known as Survival Mode? In other words, don't just take what's offered you, but lunge for it.

And if it so happens you've taken one or two fingers along with the first bite, why, so much the better for all your pains and effort. I mean, we're all more or less jungle animals anyway, right? Or at least we ought to be, if we know what's good for us. (Funny, isn't it? - how we God-fearing Americans have such a hard time believing passionately in evolution, except when it comes to how we treat each other . . . Hence also, perhaps, our God-fearing murder rates, in which statistic - if I'm reading correctly - we've been leading the Modern World since well before the Birth of the Modern Ghetto. Or could it be that the bulk of our killings are done by that c. 15% of us who atheist or agnostic . . . )

And meanwhile, if the jungle becomes more concrete as well as abstract - or better yet, becomes more plastic and filled with circuitry! - why, so much the better for the survival prospects of the species. After all, aren't most of us mere individual human beings just so many steps and stairs on which the race ascends to Economic Glory (unlike our busy globe-enriching organizations, which - in any case - must needs be free to take the elevators)?

It would be nice to know if we are in fact getting nastier by necessity. Because as we pretty much know already, in today's efficiency-enlightened world, survival and its requirements can be made to cover a cornucopian mass of sins and other offenses. And if I'm correct, might not this rampant survivalism have serious moral - not to mention economic morale - consequences for even our brightest and most efficient workers? Really, how much are they all worth anyhow, in the final cost-benefit analysis? I mean, they're only human.

Imagine, then, a world in which every kindness, every courtesy, every generosity is nearly always interpreted as either weakness or manipulation. Or both. And interpreted in such a way that the most brutal advantage is nearly always taken of these gestures. ("Thank you? Yeah, right.") Even by, every now and then, one's closest family members. Or at least by those among them who value their own employment prospects and other survival indicators. And in such a way, meanwhile, that any person fool enough to extend these human decencies is safely presumed to getting - in the end - what he or she deserves.

Such a world is about as near a thing to Hell on Earth as I hope we hypermoderns* ever get. I just never dreamed we'd be getting there so expressly, and in such a hurry.

* To call us post-modern would be both grossly flattering and wildly inaccurate.

On the other hand, if such a deliciously seething pot of moral chaos isn't begging for the "lid" of a "Beast," what is?

Strange Bedfellows?

Words (again).

Does anyone know how Man comes to make the extraordinary sounds he does? Line by line, precept by precept, generation by nameless generation - until at length the right word resounds clear, bell-like, as if from out of some inmost corridor of one's own soul . . .

Who can be sure, then, that the majority of our everyday household words merely say what they mean, and don't also sound like what they mean? That the sound of a well-chosen word rarely if ever helps to situate, to anchor and fasten down, that word's meaning? That our simplest, most time-honed and time-hallowed words have little or nothing in them of the deliberately onomatopoeic? Or that both the meanings and the sounds of many of our best words haven't got myriad criss-crossing, multi-layered, multi-sedimented relationships with other words, of similar sound?

Take a moment to listen to the following sounds. Try to hear the music, the mystery - and yes, the overlapping, interlacing meanings - enwoven into the rhymes of such familiar words as loud, crowd, proud, shroud. And then tell me if you can think of better, more grating, more relentless sounds for any of those things. Or words that reinforce more powerfully the kinship of those particular things with each other . . .

An Unmerciful Steward

For some reason I'm getting really tired of hearing the phrase social injustice. There's something about the mere wording itself that I don't like. To me, the expression seems all but guaranteed to ensure that whatever social result we achieve by invoking it is going to be very different from - if not the opposite of - the aim we first intended. In other words, it's a phrase almost sure to come back and bite us in the end.

I wonder, too, if much of what modern liberals decry as social injustice, at least in the wealthier countries, is not in fact something altogether different. It may be nothing more than a certain very familiar process: a kind of sifting or winnowing, if you will, whereby those who are deemed ruthless, exacting and enterprising enough to be worthy of a society's lion's share of wealth, power and influence get exactly what they deserve. And then some. So that, by those particular standards of social worthiness, what really is going on is the most precise and accurate social justice.

But I think I've found another phrase, which perhaps much better serves the purpose liberals may be intending. The purpose of my phrase is to describe a certain other familiar practice, or process: the one by which organizations compete with each other to use the people they depend on to the point of sickness, if not unto death - and then deny that they ever needed them. Or in some cases even deny, Peter-like, that they ever knew them. And so naturally, for this pattern - this process by which people don't so much get what they deserve as they are given what we all know they don't - I prefer the term social unmercy. And while no doubt I may be over-reacting, I seem to find evidence of it almost everywhere. And what amazes me, in particular, is that such an abundance of social unmercy as we enjoy today is somehow deemed compatible with our present, upgraded version of American culture. In other words, with our Christianly-upgraded American culture.

One might reasonably have expected just the opposite. Given our current hearty levels of profession of sound Christian faith, one might have hoped something more on the order of social mercy would have come naturally to us. And all the more so given our current numbers and strength. For my part I can't think of a time when Christians were more thoroughly marbled through each and every layer and segment of American society. Including the ownership or management of God knows how many key - or soon-to-be key? - American businesses, foundations, etc. For the umpteenth time we Christians have proven we know how to get things done. And even to kick ass. Indeed I'm sure at times it must seem - at least to those on the receiving end - as if we were competing with the most remorseless Chinese sweatshop-owners to prove who can make dependable and trustworthy human creatures feel more expendable. Really, what is this Thing anyway, that we Christian Americans feel we must sacrifice to the mainland Chinese, that we shouldn't be working twice as hard to make an acceptable sacrifice to our Maker? Ah, but what am I thinking . . .

Behold, O blessed children of Locke, these our mighty, modern, ironclad Laws of Economics, that were even the prophets Amos and Micah alive to see their glorious work, they could but mutter Thomistically: "Everything I have written is straw."

On the other hand, assuming it truly is mercy, and mercy Divinely poured out, that we rich and influential Christians have received, is it asking so much that we should humanly pass it on?

The Horizon We've Lost

“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.”


Might I paraphrase a quote from a dear old film that’s none the worse for age and wear? The original Lost Horizon (1937) may not be to everybody’s most fashionably hypermodern tastes. It’s stiff and hokey in places, though delightfully homely in others. Though I have to admit, the qualities called to mind by that last adjective – basic human warmth, and an extraordinary patience in the teeth of even our worst kinds of impatience – are hardly the virtues most likely to commend the film to some of our more ideologically purpose-driven souls today. Thank God He hasn’t appointed our generation to be the final arbiters of all wisdom. And as regards homeliness, who’s to say that the truths we first learned at home – at the beginning, so to speak – may not also be the truths we’ll most need at the end?

In any case, one of the things that most fascinates me about the film is a certain line it contains, that I believe is true of all of us, and no less true today than when our first parents first sinned. Somewhere near the climax of the story, Ronald Coleman’s character, Conway, makes a very interesting observation about a certain much-older-than-she-looks young “local” woman, the Russian-born Maria. Here is a “girl” who has no realistic idea how long she has been living in the - to all appearances - mysteriously youth- preserving confines of Shangri-La. For all we know, as the movie unfolds, it may be well over a century. All we can be sure of is that it seems to her like an eternity. And yet, like any healthy, vigorous young person, she more or less assumes she’s got at least one or two more eternities to go. As Conway reflects on the prospect of her leaving forever the lengthiest “home” she’s ever known, he insists (to his differently-opinioned brother) that “she is a fragile thing, who needs to live in a place where fragile things are loved.”

True enough about Maria, one may safely suppose. After all, she’s a movie creature, and must needs live and die on the movie’s terms. But what about us real-life creators, as we prepare confidently to extend and perfect our human longevity into a superhumanly indeterminate future? And in particular, what about those commandingly efficient souls among us who, as all markets know and proclaim, shall alone be the ones most fit to lead and prod us into this bold new world?* At first glance Conway’s cautionary note may not seem to apply to us at all. And certainly not to the “best” and most enterprising of us. And even if we were all as fragile as Maria, it would not exactly be the easiest thing about us to detect.

*Or else leave us behind in the old one?

It so happens that we humans have this most brutally-ingrained mental habit, as old and as foolish as Creation’s first murderer, of worshiping strength and despising weakness. And all in the apparent belief that it will make the world a better place. Or in any event a more interesting and challenging place. But while this habit may speak volumes about the kind of creators – or even the kind of gods – we’d all like to be, it doesn’t say beans about the sort of creatures we really are. Nowadays, perhaps under the influence of more recent and very different schools of film-making – well, we may not exactly equate strength with badness. But I think as often as not we find ourselves assuming that the two are at least directly proportionate: the badder we are, the stronger we are. Or even, the stronger we want to be, the badder we must become? And much of our experience of “life” may, at least for a time, seem to corroborate this assumption. But what about those strengths of ours, so admired and applauded by the “prosperous” world, that only work to hide our weaknesses from us, until such a day as we find out – much, much too late – how weak we really were? And what about those strong, sturdy vices we cultivate, again so conducive to the world’s “prosperity,” that only serve to divert and distract us from the good we might have been, until at length we stand – again, much too late for the doing of any good – before the throne of Absolute Goodness?

The truth is that nobody is ever either as bad, or as strong, as we think they are. Or even as bad or as strong as they themselves would like to be. At least not in this life. No, the consummate “perfection” of evil in any human soul must wait for its fulfillment in another life, in a very different kind of existence, which I pray none of us may ever see or attain.

Meanwhile, back in this present life, what sort of creatures are we? We are, it seems to me, the sort of creatures who have been most graciously and generously limited by God in this matter of how bad or how strong we can be. And what limits us is this precious, abundant thing we have already been made, as distinct from the rather meager and less-than-precious things we try or succeed in making ourselves. And the more the distinction between these two has become apparent to me, the more thoroughly I’m persuaded of two other things. The more I am convinced that we humans are:

(1) much less morally different from each other – much less “better” or “worse” – than we think we are; and
(2) we are much more fragile than even the strongest and wisest of us could ever humanly conceive.

So fragile, in fact, that it’s precisely when we strive most proudly and manfully, as it were, to transgress or transcend these God-inwoven limitations that we do the most harm. It is then that we go the furthest in breaking and shattering, not only other people – and them often irreparably, so far as their goodness and usefulness in this life is concerned – but our own best selves too. Of course, there is nothing we break that God cannot put back together. But that’s another, much broader and deeper story.

In the first place, I have no doubt the differences separating the best from the worst of us aren’t nearly so great in God’s sight as they are in ours. Just think about it. God being all that He is, and all that He does, how could it be otherwise? Our Maker is not “of a piece” with the best of us, nor is He three or four grades above the best. Rather is He outside the grading-scale altogether, being both its inventor, its paymaster, and the one who supplies the health and strength by which the laborers work. On top of it all, every so often He’s been known to revise that scale, in sometimes the most drastic, unexpected, and even disconcerting ways. Only our Maker could make a sage out of a beggar, or a dunce out of a CEO. And I think that means our God is such, in effect, that even today’s most esteemed and accoladed CEOs would be unwise to boast in His presence, or to presume even a direct lineage or kinship however remote. And I've been told more or less the same holds true of the most perfect and righteous Pharisees. Or even our own most brilliant and self-dependent entrepreneurs.

“Not nearly so great in God’s sight.” There remains of course the question of our own sight, which these days – at least in the realm of economics (if not politics) – often appears to be all we’ve got to go on. But even there, where the human moral divide may seem at times a yawning chasm, surely the gap at its worst has never been anything that Divine grace, humanly embodied, cannot bridge? Or that Divine love, humanly expressed, cannot close? Indeed I don’t see how we can believe anything else, and not also believe that God died a human death - and passed on to us a Divinely-human Life - for nothing.

In the second place, the “strongest” of us are not so very different from that decades-long “prisoner” of Shangri-la, Maria – the fragile rebel whose dreams and ambitions for a better life (not unlike Satan’s?) so vastly exceeded both her wisdom about life, and her knowledge of herself and her origins. And who in consequence began her journey out, across the Himalayas, with the physical constitution of a twenty-year-old, and ended it with the corpse of a centenarian. Like Maria we are all fragile things, who need to live in a place where fragile things are loved – and not despised. Indeed, how else, if not by means of this Place and this Love, is our fragility ever to be made strong? or our strength ever to be made holy and pure? But if we keep on mocking and deriding, and being ashamed of and disgusted with, our fragility – both our own and each other’s – if we continue to press on down this road of self-attenuation, of self-mutilation that we call Power and Growth and Progress, then I’ll tell you one thing of which I’m certain. We shall not only continue to eviscerate our hope of ever finding such a place in the world to come, but we shall destroy, root and branch and seed and soil, all vestiges of such a place in our present universe as well. And then, having run out of worlds to conquer and “be strong” in, where shall we go?

Modern Insomnia

"Money never sleeps." So much the worse for money. And for all of us who put our trust in it.