Charles Barber writes in Salon that we now live in the Age of Trauma.

Every era has a particular mental disorder, you see, and for 21st century America that disorder is PTSD.  He writes:

The mother was dreaming about the closet.

The closet was always there, just around the corner in Bill’s room, a closet with a lock on the outside.

She’d only been put in there three times, but it seemed like fifty because of the dreams.

No louvres.

The groping shirtsleeves.

The smell of stale, stored cigarettes.

The smell of shoes.

Worst of all, the smell of the guns.

The first time he put her in there, he’d forgotten about the guns.

This is how it happened.

Time is circular, so after the serpent convinced Adam and Even to bite the forbidden apple, they were given the knowledge of good and evil, made more like God, and expelled from paradise.  Not being God, they did not understand why, and so they tilled the soil with their hands, and then with makeshift hoes, and then with plows.  They domesticated horses, and built with mud and clay, and gradually learned to stack rocks on top of one another and seal them together, to create the first wall, and then the first city.

Fully clothed, Richard Yoost lay flat as a plank across the covers on the king-size bed.  It was ninety degrees out and only a slight cross breeze came through the bedroom windows.  The plank position was his first response test, and he learned early on it left an impression that he usually sided with at the end of his inspection.  There was one time two years ago that he was fooled by a fluffed up feather bed.  Otherwise, at this point in his career even on top of the bedding, he was generally dead-on, immediately.  The rest was just measurements and paperwork.

William Eggington has an essay in the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog about the way in which Borges and Kant(among others) prefigured the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

I was alone in the forest.  I was alone on the hill.  The sky above me was midnight blue, and its darkness shone like a sheet of glass in the moonlight.  But there was no moon.  There were even no stars, though there should have been:  the nearest town was dozens of miles away.

I stared up at the empty sky.  Midnight blue, the color of a ceramic tile from ancient Persia.  I walked through the brush looking up, catching glimpses of the perfect night through the tree tops.

I heard a flute.

“How could you stand there naked in front of a bunch of strangers, stark naked?”

Phil didn’t get it, and that saddened Karen a bit. He usually got her perfectly.

“Well, for a shy person, it was the perfect job. I didn’t have to talk to anybody, or make eye contact with anyone. It’s like what I do now.”

“Writing? How so?”

“I am a shy exhibitionist.”

Facebook ergo sum.  Or, by contrast:  I am not on Facebook, therefore I do not exist. 

This is not the conclusion of an extraordinary new article by Rob Horning, “Google Alert for the Soul” – it is the premise. 

Once, he had graded papers.  People make jokes about a red pen, but it had been standard, back in those days, and the students hadn’t argued.  The red, like the robe of an inquisitor, had meant authority.  He was a polymath, teaching history and mathematics both … a noted expert in the history of mathematics … and he’d been good enough at his work to enjoy it.  But it had been waiting, and it had never come.  Not once, in 30 years, had he felt the electric shock that comes with a student standing up and rebelling for the sake of truth.  They had rebelled, a few of them, the brave ones, the

I’m going to admit something.

Back when I was a kid, a truly little kid, I would sit in front of the TV and watch the old 60’s Batman show … and didn’t know that it was camp.

Come on.  What did I know from camp?  I vaguely knew how the whole “superhero” thing was supposed to go (I’m not sure how the structure seeped into my brain), and the Adam West “Batman” seemed to hit all the right notes to a still fairly naïve 7-year-old, even if many of the particulars struck me as odd around the edges.