CIVILIZATION SLIPPING During the 1980s, the concept of globalization began to permeate a diverse body of literatures within the social sciences. This intellectual fascination with globalization, in which daily processes were becoming increasingly enmeshed in global processes, contributed in subtle ways to the rampant force that seemed to be part of the dark heart of this transitional age. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, October 29, 1997. While I was watching the slippage of civilization into its heart of darkness, like some kind of secondary reality, out there, on the box, periscopes up, bringing it in through the tube, some intensity was sucked out, down, in, away from my heart, day-after-day, hour-by-hour, year-by-year, until now, this very hour, a strange quietness invades my soul, an easy peace, as I watch the endless succession of signs in an endless conversation with life, where an uneasiness, cold and dark, whispers through the spaces, the rooms and high into the trees, harrowing up the souls of the earth's inhabitants like a rampant force. Ron Price 29 October 1997
