From Robinson Jeffers, California’s own poet/prophet, comes a warning from 1925. Eerily prescient. Seems to me that every hundred years or so, humanity must descend again into ignorance (and the cruelty that always follows in its tracks) before we learn again to exorcise the demons that have found room to grow while we’ve naively slept.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass

hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and

home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or

suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center;

corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the

mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable

master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–God, when he walked

on earth.