In the darkness the trees are full of starlight (henwy) wrote,
In the darkness the trees are full of starlight
henwy
  • Mood: thoughtful

And all the king's horses and all the king's men

There are so many luxuries in our lives. By that, I don't mean cars or air conditioning or even the iphone. I'm thinking more about things like justice or compassion or morality. We don't really think of those as being luxuries, but it's not hard to see how they would easily be stripped away if our simple lives of leisure were taken from us. I always start thinking about such things whenever I read novels of post-apocalyptic worlds. Most recently, it was from Cormac McCarthy's The Road and now, Terry Brooks' The Elves of Cintra. In both, the characters exist in a world where society has fallen and mankind has been reduced to struggling to meet the most basic of needs. In that world, you see the many things we take for granted, abandoned because the people cannot pay the cost for them. While you might not realize it at first, there is a huge cost to be payed for any of the things I listed above. A cost payed in the sacrifice of valuable resources that could be better applied. Instead of justice or compassion or morality, the new force that guides an individual would become expedience and survival.

I sometimes think about this even in the context of our world today. Look at socialistic Europe with many of their post-modern nutjobs.. Some of whom spend their time forming committees about the rights of plants. In a world where some people struggle daily just to find enough food to survive, there are others sitting in comfy conference rooms debating the rights of broccoli. The dissonance is almost unbelievable in its starkness. The more that we have our needs met as a species, the more we sink into decadence. I can't help but wonder where the happy medium is in all of this.
Tags: book club, book club: cormac mccarthy, book club: terry brooks, daily ponder
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