Just started Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I am about 50 pages into it, and something very drastic must have happened, it's all very bleak and lifeless. What kind of cowards would have precipitated this devastation? Some neocon chest thumping?
All memory, all history, even knowledge will have vanished. What is the point of history? What should a philosophy of it be? Should it not be a sustainable life congruent with the dignity of man? Check out this quote:
From Werner Jaeger's Paideia:
"In the funeral speech over the dead Athenian soldiers, which Thucydides wrote soon after the end of the war and put in Pericles' mouth, he still saw Athens as lit by the last beams of that radiance. Through his words there still glows something of the ardor of that brief but brilliant dream, well worthy of the Athenian genius-the dream of building a state so skillfully that it might keep strength and spirit in perpetual equipoise. When he composed that speech, he already knew the paradoxical truth which all his generation had to learn: that even the most solid of earthly powers must vanish into thin air, and that only the seemingly brittle splendor of the spirit can long endure"
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