The Modern World

This modern world is so endlessly abstract it's hard to know what to make of it, where to begin, how to penetrate it. It seems to defy all perusal. You prod here- there's nothing there; you prod somewhere else- nothing again. Perhaps the trouble is with "the modern world" itself.
At some point, a few centuries ago, perhaps, people, which is to say, some of them, the most advanced ones, began to believe they inhabited this "modern world," and all that had gone before was mere history, superstition, an embarrassment- though what's there to be embarrassed about- whereas now in this modern world reality had suddenly, or perhaps gradually, appeared, and would go on appearing, and ever more so. We are now up to our necks in it to the point where we have passed over, or begun to pass over, into some kind of "virtual reality," glancing over our shoulders every now and again to see how reality is getting on. Not too well? Oh well, what can you expect of reality, even one so abstract. Perhaps like modern painting that is the drive of history: the movement into absolute abstraction.