The Enlightenment? Ha!

With the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy.  After a period in which the Western world had enjoyed order, tranquility, unity, and oneness with its True God and Trinity, there appeared winds of change which spelled evil days ahead.  An ill wind blows no one good [...] Fortuna's wheel had turned on humanity, crushing its collarbone, smashing its skull, twisting its torso, puncturing its pelvis, sorrowing its soul.  Having once been so high, humanity fell so low.  What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale.

Merchants and charlatans gained control of Europe, calling their insidious gospel "The Enlightenment." [...] The gyro had widened; The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition and self-improvement were to be Piers' new fate.  And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the pervesion of having to GO TO WORK.

Like so many people

Her logic was a combination of half-truths and cliches, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

IV How is home felt?

The Levy home stood among the pines on a small rise overlooking the gray waters of Bay St. Louis.  The exterior was an example of elegant rusticity; the interior was a successful attempt at keeping the rusting out entirely, a permanently seventy-five-degree womb connected to the year-round air-conditioning unit by an umbilicus of vents and pipes that silently filled the rooms with filtered and reconstituted Gulf of Mexico breezes and exhaled the the Leveys' carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke and ennui.  The central machinery of the great life-giving unit throbbed somewhere in the acoustically tiled bowls of the home, like a Red Cross instructor giving cadence in an artificial respiration class, "In comes the good air, out goes the bad air, in comes the good air."

The home was as sensually comfortable as the human womb supposedly is.  Every chair sank several inches at the lightest touch, foam and down surrendering abjectly to any pressure.  The tufts of the acrylic nylon carpets tickled the ankles of anyone kind enough to walk on them.  Beside the bar what looked like a radio dial would, upon being turned, make the lighting throughout the house as mellow or as bright as the mood demanded.  Located through the house within easy walking distance of one another were contour chiars, a massage table, and a motorized exceising board whose many sections prodded the body with a motion that was at lonce gentle yet suggestive.  Levy's Lodge- that was what the sign at the coast road said- was a Xanadu of the senses; within its insulated walls there was something that could gratify anything