1yulSVC

Dialectics
Kevin Honold
The girl asked the Moon if this was the best of all possible worlds
and he affirmed, after months of painstaking deliberation, that it wasn’t.
In order to answer this question, he said, you must have a working knowledge
of calculus and be hell on logic, too. You must
nurse a healthy suspicion of superlatives—the nicest mafioso is, after all,
probably not very nice. You should prove willing to court heresy, which at any rate
entails no great risk, being legal now and not very interesting.
But the best of all possible worlds will come
round again, I promise. Poets and philosophers will once more run afoul
of shoguns and feudal lords, plays will again spark street riots,
painters will be hauled up before popes. Bells alone will sound
the backdrop of our days, and horses—in a redux
of man’s crowning achievement—will once again be promoted to priests.
We’ll bring firecrackers to our new best possible world to frighten the squatter gods
off the land, and surveyors’ levels and seed to reclaim it. We ought
to bring along a pocketful of this world’s dirt, I think.
You know, just to remind us.
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