Not Done Well With Sanity

(From “Absinthe Heroes: The Steampunk Rock Opera”.)

ANTIKYTHERA (enters):  You’re no patriot, Mayor.

MAYOR:  I owe my allegiance, not to England, but to the Human Race.

ANTIKYTHERA:  You want to better its lot?

MAYOR:  I want to increase human knowledge and understanding.

ANTIKYTHERA:  Because it will save us?

MAYOR:  Because it will presumably drive us mad and, as a race, we have not done well with sanity.  We know too much to have stayed in caves or trees – but much too little to destroy ourselves properly.  Why must we go about it in such a slow, haphazard fashion?  It is positively slothful!

ANTIKYTHERA:  But our knowledge advances every day, and we get closer and closer to a better world.

MAYOR:  And a better time.  A time of ceaseless wonder.

CHAS (entering) Ceaseless wonder!

ANTIKYTHERA:  Great happiness!

MAYOR:  Logic and reason!

CHAS:  I have devoted my life to those things..

ANTIKYTHERA:  It is the most rewarding life imaginable.

CHAS:  If one doesn’t mind being a servant of numbers.

MAYOR: Beg pardon?

CHAS:  For every great truth we discover, we discover ten million falsehoods or lies or pieces of vision that we truly do not understand or use well.  This is not a bad thing; great truths may have that kind of value.  But if I discover a thousand things, have I moved the world?  Or have I simply been a few steps along the way to that ten-millionth fragment of inspiration?

ANTIKYTHERA:  And your love of science?

CHAS: Is my longing for magic.

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