For a moment I wanted to present an image to meditate on: the comparison of modern civilization to gravel, which I know, sounds like a weird non-sequitur, but bear with me.
We have this paradox in which modern civilization, with its basis in settled agricultural society and its historical fierce antipathy toward any kind of nomadic culture, manages at the same time to fling itself to every corner of the globe, in constant movement and undergoing constant and rapid change.
Consider that gravel, when piled too deep, especially on an incline, can get to flowing like a fluid under the right conditions, such as with gravity being exerted on it, especially through the mass of a vehicle or some other heavy object pressing upon it.
The gravel, as a multitude of the typically stationary and inert hard rock, which relates loosely to itself, and which through its hardness and non-porousness fails to achieve a bond with the soil beneath, grows ever looser in the upper layers which are furthest from the ground, and which gets to moving free as it is set against itself, flowing like a fluid, which is weird and interesting to watch, and even weirder to feel sitting right on top of it.
And then you have civilization, with its occupants growing weary of moving across the earth and as a part of the earth, settling down, walling themselves off from the earth and gradually encasing themselves in finer enclosures, watching the earth disappear, the whole mass of it piling up, going further and further out to exploit ever more far-flung resources necessary to rise ever more off the ground, and then the whole thing begins to move and shift with ever more liquidity, going from a rooted thing to more of a fluid, like a great mudslide or a lahar.
And this doesn't have to be how civilization actually exists, but it is how ours at this historical moment exists.
