Calasso's style of historiography, fully postmodernized and deconstructed, is the literate and literal proof of the new era forged in revolution, crowned by Napoleonic will to power, and shattered in the 20th century into a million microchips of silicon. With these new artisans, it seems that the redemption which the earlier Italian renaissance found in artistic expressions of sublime beauty, has been rediscovered in the confounding nature of all storytelling. Thus Calasso's Talleyrand performs rituals as an ancient, and yet like a modern is always conscious of those rites soullessness. Napoleon discovered that if you crown yourself emperor you do not merely flaunt God and the papacy, but you become God and papacy in one. Thus found Zarathustra that there is no hiding place for the priest who kills God.
Modernity is experimental rather than cyclical.
As we slip into the haze induced by the opiate that are these stories, we are each alone, each on our own, with no consciousness at all, aware only of our own existence, our own pleasured senses. Thus we moderns are thrust by the artists and critics of this new renaissance, not into an Iron Cage, but onto a moebius loop which turns beneath us as the flat surface of the fitness club treadmill upon we which spend so many hours atrot seeking the euphoric release of endorphins. The only question remaining is the limit and the robustness of this addiction. Richard DeLaurell is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Communication Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.