If you haven’t walked a meandering path all over the political and spiritual landscape, you probably won’t have experienced the panic that overwhelms you the morning after you’ve returned from that tacitly secular, hyperbolically ambivalent place generally accepted today as the mainstream.
You might be free of confusion and nagging unease for the first time in years, but your peace of mind will be brought up short by the question:
What am I going to read now?
For that matter, what am I going to watch, or listen to? It might seem like a flippant question, but if you either simmer or stew in modern culture – pop, middlebrow or high – you’ll know with a heart-stopping certainty that the vast majority of what’s in books or magazines, on TV, in movies or coming out of your radio or headphones has not been created with you in mind, and some of it wakes up in the morning eager to go about the business of offending you before lunch.
Double the sickening effect of that anxious revelation if you’re in the business of writing books, playing music, or working in film, TV or theatre.
