I was thinking today that maybe one of the reasons it is so difficult for a person in the modern world to really figure out how to live his or her life is that we have completely lost the powerful language of self-transformation of previous generations. We don't see ourselves as battling demons, or wrestling with angels, or constantly brushing up against eternal damnation. We don't think our soul will be stolen by the beautiful person we glimpse on midsummer eve never to be returned, we don't descend into hell to find our lost love, we don't ask the oracles anything at all, we don't see ourselves as the inheritors of kingdoms. We don't plug our seamen's ears against the sirens and we don't hear them ourselves. We don't have ecstatic visions or act out ancestral dramas which are ours to resolve. We don't look for the invisible or worry about giants, or watch the sky. Our world is not only very secular but it is populated by people who are all approximately our size.

But surely we don't feel things less intensely than the people of the past. Our struggles are no less a matter of life and death for not being couched in that language. Or do others disagree? Do you find the modern language of, say, psychology adequate for describing the struggles of human life? I'm not sure we aren't massively illiterate in a certain way, that we haven't simply erased an entire way of speaking and writing (however imperfect it might have been), leaving us with no way to understand a certain kind of experience.