Anciently it was foretold that the Age of Ignorance and Darkness — our age — would be marked with a word: deceit.

Deceit tends to flourish when people who know better start acting as if they don’t. When, for myriad reasons, they deny their own eyesight.

Deceit often grows in a community when we grant each other permission to believe in the creative illusions of a dominant body, which is also our own.

The figure of Evelyn Disc is nothing but the figure of the Great Pretender. Disc struts heavy on the stage, rattling off and on, in what seems in language to be true — while his every internal motion vibrates with trickery and self-flattery.

Evelyn Disc kills the Beloved with his mere, yet epoch-making, power of pretense, a power that siphons its fuel from the well of self-deceit in his followers.

Pretense can infect a community like a microscopic virus, distorting its public personality, and making it contemptuous even to its own.

Pretense often carries a great feeling of truth. It begins with a closed eye and ends with an open mouth. More a mime of death than a speech-maker on a stage.

Pretense is the all-annihilating human indulgence, the colossus of our world, straddling nations and minds.

In my community, maybe in yours too, we pride ourselves in being absorbed only in what is true.

Peoples with integrity will swear off pretense.

They’ll sip, with some temperance,

the lucid waters of life.