as joe wenderoth writes in his fast food missive...

"There's a point when certain grave emotions are rendered preposterous by their surrounding circumstances. I think the impetus for the Letters was, in part, my fondness for the grandiosity of certain 19th-century poets and philosophers—it seems like that kind of grandiosity is no longer possible, like some great wave of Triviality has made it painfully apparent that all such grandiose Efforts at Truth are ridiculous in the extreme."