We insist on the right to be different, and then we claim that the differences make no difference. We give out the license to bed down with whomever we please, and then concede that talk about "love" is only talk about a private, often capricious feeling, even an appetite -- confining it to the person who happens to feel it, for the time wherein the feeling is present.
We pride ourselves upon our independence, who live alone, in dead-bolted apartments, hanged by the neck until half dead with luxuries we don't enjoy and jobs we are not interested in, among people we don't like. Children may come along, those most powerful catapults against the fortresses of our self-sufficiency, but we shoulder them out of the way, and shut them up in some asylum or other where they will be taken care of, for a few hours between confinement and confinement. We have spare time, not leisure; we flee the freedom of not having something "important" to do as if it were a snake offering us the chance to go back to Eden. Our laughter is not the free and openhearted laughter of people caught up in joy; there is nothing "silly" about it in the wonderful old sense of the word, both foolish and blessed at once. Nothing is farther from joy than a snicker.
In the end, there can be no joy so long as we are wrapped in ourselves, and modernity has nothing, nothing at all, with which to pierce that cocoon; instead, it has called the cocoon "self-fulfillment" and has used it as the model for its non-society of separate, lonely, dependable, sleeping larvae. Christ is our Joy -- pure gift, demanding pure, liberating surrender.
Article:
Modernity As Confinement
