Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. (Wallace Stevens, from Sunday Morning)

Why this confidence that technical ingenuity can drive through, over or around any obstacle? Even the dead end of death itself is seen by the more fanatic of the Techno-Utopian thinkers as a barrier that will somehow be conquered. Apparently they’ll be carried into the infinite limit of the Singularity on the backs of 72 virginity-regenerating sex robots.Read More »