Musilese IV

A few things I've inked in The Man lately:

"Now please don't think," he said, turning to her in all seriousness, "that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality."
 
*** 
     "And what would you do," Diotima asked irritably, "if you could rule the world for a day?" 
     "I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality."

***
 
If we ask ourselves dispassionately how science has arrived at its present state--an important question in itself, considering how entirely we are in its power and how not even an illiterate is safe from its domination, since he has to learn to live with countless things born of science--we get a different picture. Credible received wisdom indicates that it all began in the sixteenth century, a time of the greatest spiritual turbulence, when people ceased trying to penetrate the deep mysteries of nature as they had done through two millennia of religious and philosophical speculation, but were instead satisfied with exploring the surface of nature in a manner that can only be called superficial. 
 
       

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