In the modern West, the hearth has gone cold. The fires that once knit family and village together have been replaced with a different flame—the flickering blue light of the screen. John Michell warned of this in his strange, luminous writings. He saw how the displacement of the hearth led to the displacement of meaning. No longer do we gather around a living fire, telling the old stories, hearing the wisdom passed down in hushed voices. No—we huddle instead around the electric glow of mass-produced stories, sold to us by the same companies who profit from our outrage, our fear, our endless hunger for novelty.

Michell said it plainly: once the hearth was the link between heaven and earth. Now, that chain has rusted. The fire we stare into now is cold, sterile, dead.

The folk tales are gone. The folk songs are gone. Replaced by noise.

And it matters. God help us, it matters. Because without the old songs, without the old myths, without the fire that once drew our gazes upward and outward toward wonder, we become small. Smaller than we were meant to be. Easily led. Easily frightened. Easily bought. It is a short step from forgetting your own songs to singing the songs of your conquerors.

And so here we are: divided, outraged, distracted. The paradise of the rich, Victor Hugo said, is built out of the hell of the poor. And our masters know it. They fuel it. They love it. They need it.

And we go on, applauding them, fighting each other, shouting ourselves hoarse over scraps.

We have forgotten who we are. Forgotten the hearth. Forgotten the brotherhood. Forgotten the great chain that links heaven to earth, earth to hearth, hearth to heart.

And unless we remember, unless we kneel, as T.S. Eliot said—not kneel before flags or corporations or the endless cult of Self, but kneel before the living God—unless we kneel, we will continue to slouch. To spectate. To slip away into silence...