civilization run amuck…Lord have mercy

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

looters 2

Images of looters ransacking Neiman Marcus in San Francisco

“Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians,
instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits,
heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough,
seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh,
sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments,
the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal
than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only
a shade and may not be so for long.”

W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Essays, Volume III

Hear our prayers oh Lord