Alone Together

When, at the Hour of the Wolf, I survey my own private landscape -- the world inhabited by my closest friends and relations -- what I see with nary an exception is spiritual impoverishment, brave people putting on brave faces.

But hasn't it always been so?  Lives of quiet desperation, the portents of Yeats' Second Coming? 

No, we've ground our civilization down into a new place that is, as never before, devoid of meaning.  It's as if we are all living in a little house on the prairie, biding our time until the Apaches, or a 100-year wind, rise to wipe the prairie pristine again.