Dear Foxy,

There is hope. Birds singing, sunbeams piercing the clouds, fish rippling the water, lion cubs suckling at mother's breast and abandoned cities gradually crumbling as greenery enfolds them. As the disease called humankind departs the rest of nature will gradually reclaim their habitat. The sixth distinction will end with the disappearance of the species that has corrupted the earth.

Human inventions of good, evil, ideology, philosophy, the supernatural and science will disappear. Then some creature will develop the ability to make abstractions, and the beat will go on.

Dear David F.,

I know that you're right!

I can honestly say that I've reached
that point in my life where I wake
up each morning with more energy
and zest than ever before. I
sometimes get filled with such joy
and excitement at the prospect of
new opportunities for this perhaps
most interesting segment of my life's
journey. "What does the future hold
for me now?" The best thing is,
I just don't know!

Well these are deep waters and I think I'll sleep on it.

Dear Foxy,

Don't you dare agree with davidf!

You can't write something brilliant like

“We need above all to fall in love with this planet,
which, as far as we know, is the only one carefully
balanced to sustain human life without assistance
from somewhere else.”

and then fall on your sword by letting him get away with;

“As the disease called humankind departs the rest of nature will gradually reclaim their habitat.”

We are nature just as any bird, fish or lion cub and as such we are driven to procreate, compete, and kill. How many zebra infants will succumb to davidf's suckling cubs? Nature ain't a 'bed of roses' so to speak.

And as my man Tom says “You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again”

However what other creature has the capacity to 'fall in love with this planet'?

For those who believe in the promise of the species nature's roar is getting dimmer and therein lies hope.

Dear davidf,

When you say “The sixth distinction will end with the disappearance of the species that has corrupted the earth.” I hear;

6:11 Now the people of the earth were corrupt in the sight of God, and the land was filled with violence.

And,

6:5 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the land, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
6:6 And the LORD was sorry that He had made man in the land, and He was grieved in His heart.
6:7 And the LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land...

This is the same Genesis God you have had occasion to rail against in past posts yet you seem to be donning his robes.

I suppose, if I were to be a little mischievous, I might paint Foxy, with her strong message of hope and zest for life, as our Jesus, although right now she is in the desert being tempted. ;)

Y'see?

>>As the disease called humankind departs the rest of nature will gradually reclaim their habitat. The sixth distinction will end with the disappearance of the species that has corrupted the earth.<<

Tol'ja

Nothing good can come from reading poetry.

Csteele: <But don't you think that tilting your lance at a thread on poetry might be a little Quixotic?

“we can only be complacent, or romantic, when the ‘suffering’ in the world is reducible to philosophy.”

Next you will be sidling up to lovers on park benches saying “It is just the drive to inseminate, cut to the chase!”>

Thanks for the witty response, though I was more alluding to Romanticism than lovers.
It is perhaps a shame to spoil a thread devoted to poetry with politics; and yet our aestheticising of literature is a modern overlay on what began as rhetoric and always had political intent and effects. To admire poetry merely for its own sake is a decadent refinement and nonsense. We draw inspiration from what we perceive to be the content, and are seduced by how it's couched. It's the rhetorical effect of the bible, for instance, much of which is palpable nonsense, that's seduced us for millennia. We're so beguiled by the poesy of the promise of eternal life, couched in such eloquent strains, that we buy it and make murderous doctrines of antiquities, of cultural texts utterly remote from our own. Which is not to say that we shouldn't be inspired by great texts, but that we should appreciate them critically, in their context and be wary of their rhetorical burden on our own.
Today, we too often fetishise cultural delights, both at the expense of the 'real' world, and to the point where they're devoid of political or contemporary didactic content (there is of course avant-garde art too, but it's seldom 'popular'). We forget that culture and its texts are 'not' real, yet they divert us inordinately from what 'is', indeed we treat them 'as' real. DavidF's scenario is a logical observation of the inevitable--which is being greatly precipitated by our indifference to the 'actual'.
"some people think that life's the thing, but I prefer reading" (Logan Pearsall Smith). ...Ah, but today reading has diversified into myriad escapism, a virtual lifeworld and afterlife, but no real world or real consequences to our real actions.