I’ve heard an awful lot about the Age of Enlightenment all throughout my life. I once understood it as shelter from ignorance, but I never deeply thought about the Age of Belief until reading The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain a few days ago. The phrase feels intentionally buried, now exhumed as an ominous warning.
It seems like faith will forever be a beautiful thing bastardized in modern times. Religious hypocrisy is cyclically conflated with real belief. Sins of institutions are imprisoned alongside the concept of divinity. Representing something we have birthed and lost. I don’t know who couldn’t also sense our void. It is as if we long ago released it from the cage envisioned around it.
The duality of man enjoys the back and forth between opposing forces of the human condition. The rivals of fact and faith within the known and unknown. Safety and potential in the flickering between meaning and void.
We live in a world a world cynical towards those who yearn for Elysium. It also rewards people for declaring life as Hell. The secret is that dueling ideologies are on the same side. All search for paradise in either a place unseen or a thought unfound. People can deny an absence of Heaven, but never their hunger for it.
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