Things seem to be not just bad, but extremely bad. On the other hand, it is also the best of times, and this contradiction may be hinted at by Jia Tolentino’s essay “Esctasy” in the concluding words as follows:
There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbearable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold on to it, to remember certain overpasses, sudden angles above and under the cold and heartless curves of that industrial landscape, a slow river of lights blinking white and red into the distance, and the debauched sky gleaming over the houses and hospitals and stadium churches, and your blood thrumming with drugs or music or sanctity. It can all feel like a mirage of wholeness: the ten thousand square miles around you teeming with millions of people who do the same things, drive under the same influences, respect the same Sundays, with the music that sounds like their version of religion. “Our life is impossibility, absurdity,” wrote Simone Weil. “everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than God.”