Roberto Calasso and the psychic persistence of the gods (Author unlisted, maybe I missed it? 
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http://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/robe...-the-gods/
)http://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/robe...-the-gods/
Quote:Calasso wonders: “But, happiness? Which of our modern scholars has ever dared consider possession, that terrorizing morbidness, a path towards happiness?” Without putting it in terms of possession, Borges suggests it in his poem “Someone”: “A man…may feel suddenly, when crossing the street, a mysterious happiness not coming from the side of hope but from an ancient innocence, from his own root or from some diffuse god.”
It rests in the dust of history, which still floats in the depths of our memory, something of those Greeks for whom “any increase in the intensity allowed them entry to the sphere of a god” (Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony). Certainly Calasso builds a poetics of the gods, full of tropes (one of which is hyperbole), but, why not concede the possibility that that which seizes us when we go out one sunny morning, or when we feel overwhelmed for no apparent reason, is one of the ancient gods of the pantheon, still latent in the darkness of the mind?
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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