I remember Bowles' intro to The Spider's House, where he was talking about preserving old Morocco in the post-war days, with the ironical twist that it was the colonialists that wanted to preserve that beauty, that the Moroccan people themselves wanted to charge headlong into modernity.

It's not quite the same thing, but I want to keep a pulse on this change. I too feel obsolete - I read recently how Janis Joplin had groomed herself as an artist, not just a singer, with all the obligatory books and poetry and style and what-not. I suppose I too got trapped in this self-image but on an even wider scale (and of course much less a success), and now I see the fanciful future pared down into a bunch of gadgets, a simplistic view of reality/philosophy, and an amazing loss of security & certainty & time for beauty even as the world becomes less complex & time-consuming. But then specializing holds no special allure, since anything you specialize in can be wiped out in 5 years, and then you "retrain", a rather flippant and pompous term I'll be coming back to more and more. I wonder what Stravinsky would have retrained as if classical had fallen out of vogue in 1910 rather than later.

I've spent much of the day reading Michael's "Unreasonable Men" to which I"ll have more to say, but I'm relieved to see LaFollette come out much less the firebrand and more the strategic but grounded thinker. There's a profound shift to come & it won't be a soft landing - it'll be faster than Uber or United fall out of favor, and despite all the attempts to lather the "revolution" with the laundry list of causes & correct values gathered from the last 60-70 years, I'm assuming it'll be taken away by someone who knows better to address the crux of the matter, to provide real but fast-moving solutions, to better appreciate the tiny nuances of all the future change the last decade & what that means for our comportment and survival and well-being. Not a huge treatise, but a few core issues from which the rest can derive.