• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1264 0

annihilate; its Macy’s parade—gargantuan, freakish, absurd balloons; the parade’s great crowd; and finally, if you live in the United States, with the celebration’s relevance to you. The Jones Beach July 4th fireworks gives you 1, 3, 7, 8, and 9. I provided a lot of details about what people did at ancient festivals and medieval carnivals because I wanted you to be able to note whether you were envious of any of it, and to be as specific as possible. Say you were envious of bathing with a piglet in the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by all the nonvirgin women of your world, and of later, in a controlled, ritualized frenzy, killing the piglet and offering it to the gods in hopes of getting a good birth in exchange. Or say you were envious of the husband-and-wife partying that went on at the Eleusinian mysteries. The reader tempted by the one may recoil at the other, but we can all understand the temptation given how tough it is to be a human being in any age, how hard it can be to get pregnant, how hard to have kids, how hard to raise them. The constant companion of anything having to do with your kids, the ones you have or the ones you wish to have, is a torrent of hope. We may also speak of a torrent of hope in our desire to be fully alive, erotic, and in love. Other moments in history have offered so many rituals to make sure these torrents had some theater of action. At the movies we watch lots of people in costume, and it must do us some good; perhaps it reminds us how our roles and personalities could theoretically be taken away or put on.

In the past, people believed that participation in the ritual or the parade actually kept the community safe, magically. We don’t have magic nowadays, but the belief is no less true. If we go to the Halloween parade, the Halloween parade continues to exist, with people like us in it, whatever that might mean. I believe such activity repairs the walls of your mental world. If you only think about it, watch it on television, or read about it in the paper, it is not enough. If you leave out the part where you actually show up with hundreds or thousands of other people, you’ve lost an immeasurable, indescribable part of the experience. There are only a few pragmatic routes to happiness, and celebration is one of them. Get out there.

Conclusion

The Triumph of Experience

In all circles of modern life, no one seems shy about using the phrase "It turns out that…” But we do not live at the end of history, and we are not boring perfection, too normal to be expected to change. “It turns out that…” is a generally inappropriate phrase. We are just another era, in another set of deeply integrated nonsense. We feel like we live in a disenchanted world. The list of creatures in whom nobody believes anymore is impressive: vampires, witches, ghosts, and demons; in some circles, aliens; and, in some circles, God. Though we feel proud of how much we know nowadays, we can find ourselves sad that our world is more reasonable than magical. Cheer up: we don’t know as much as we think we do, and we are, in fact, magical. That is the correction I have been trying to make. I hope this book brought into vision the enchanted world: the enchanted details of our own particular moment’s beliefs and habits—our diets as internal corsets, our conviction that the well-fed are hungry; but also the enchantment that we share with so much of Western history—our wolves, our missing girls, our baths, our passages through hell and back. This is who we are. We are part of something rich and strange. To be aware of it is to consciously take part in it and to be happy, or happy enough. We do not need to hide in fear, whether in the form of religion or nationalism, scientism or politics. Life—this wolfless, literate, pharmaceutical, big-screen fantasy that we share—ought to be embraced for what it is: a victory of desires, the dream of our ancestors, and another tumble in the kaleidoscope of historical culture. Eat it raw or eat it cooked, but feast, and go out there and meet your wolves, let yourself be feasted on, see