Do I Contradict Myself?

Do I Contradict Myself?

Neil Gabler, in today’s New York Times:

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.

Not the type of thing I want to think about on vacation.  But it is inescapable.  Sunday morning, on a rare Sunday off, the paper is an luxury I cannot afford to pass up.  And yet, the as the paper trails into the cottage, so does the world.  Or a little bit of it any way.

Very well then, I contradict myself.

Roger Cohen, also from the Times today:

August was once a time for dreaming, wandering the empty streets of this city, reading silly-season newspaper stories after a leisurely lunch washed down with Sancerre, gazing at squares where fountains plashed and the pregnant or the old chatted on benches at dusk. Then something happened.

This morning, the lake is again glass.  There is the random motorboat pulling a water skier.  There is the  occasional conversation that, through the vagaries of acoustics and water, gets transmitted through the dock and ends up on the porch — like a stray radio signal.

I came to the woods to get away from the world.  Is that even possible know?  Are there grooves already worn in our brains that lead us to the trough of information every morning?  We must graze.

London burns.  Fundamentalists are inching eastward, bringing their own brand of national Christianity with them.  Armageddon may be the plains of upstate New York — that already scorched region — as secularists and Christianists finally decide who owns the soul of the country.

I am multitudes.