Where Authors and Composers Meet

I've been thinking about a book I read long ago by Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, subtitled How Queer Man is, How Queer Language is, and What One Has to Do with the Other.  In his collection of essays, Percy writes about what he sees as the conclusion of the modern age and the dawning of a new, as-yet-unnamed age.

The essays open with rhetorical questions...

Why do people feel bad in an age when they have accumulated the wealth necessary to satisfy their needs? 

Why do people feel bad in an age when they have discovered the technology to make over the world for their own use?

Why have people entered an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history?

Why have people done so in the very century when they had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and harmony?

What do people do when they find themselves living after an age has ended?

How do people undertsand themselves when the theories of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known?

How do people function when everything is upside down, people feeling bad when they should feel good, good when they should feel bad?

Written in 1975, the book addresses a problem artists still consider:  why are people so unhappy in an age when we know better, have better, and achieve better than we have at any time in history.

A Christian music group, Love and Theft, asks the same question Percy does in their song Dancing in Circles.

I don't understand why we do what we do to each other.
According to His word, we're all born sisters and brothers.
But we lie and we steal, we fight and we kill,
Even though we know the way...

All through the ages, we've tried to share this world together.
Turning the pages, pretending we'll live here forever.
But we'll have to face our maker someday,
And reap what we've sown all the way...

And we know how, so why can't we just get it right
I pray someday we'l overcome all the damage we've done
And we'll fly!

Why do we go dancing in circles when we know it never ends?
We come so close to loving each other and then...
We go dancing in circles again.

We ought to be doing better.

Even the artists know it.

And this is the basis for the Lenten show I've written for next Spring.  We know better.