"An angel came to me and said: ‘O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou are going in such career’ I said: ‘perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable"We—as a people—have no spiritual identity. Not that pan-Europeans lack spiritual impulse, or spiritual distinctions—we have all that, from New Age to Calvinism—what we lack is an identity of ourselves as a cohesive group of mutually respecting believers: a spiritual identity that encloses all of us as members of our Folk. And it has been to our detriment—it took a long time coming, granted—but we now face a withered future. Shriveled in spirit, shriveled in self-respect, shriveled in unity. We are decaying, spiritually, and have been doing so for a long time (almost 2000 years)—what’s more, it is just getting faster and faster—take the last 60 years as a mere foretaste of what’s coming.
—William Blake
