Does it seem as if our society has a direction it is traveling? Do you feel a strong sense of direction, and faith that the world will be more or less the same when you have traversed your way?
Obama is in some ways the Timelessness President. He exists on TV screens. He exists in interviews. But who IS he? Much of America doesn’t seem to care. Whoever he WAS, he exists today on the TV. His Presence is eternal, and his past is irrelevant. This is not just the result of conscious campaign choices by his handlers, but an aspect of our culture as it exists today. So much change happens, that things seem to stand still, at least to my eye. It is so many clouds puffing up, filling the sky, then being blown away by the wind, to be replaced by new ones.
This is a vague sense I have. It is what I at times call the “de Chirico” sense, after the Italian much admired by the Surrealists. Here is a pictorial representation–not, I think, the first on this site–of what I feel:
