and look pale against the backdrop of solidly written and painted fantasies on FB. Girls… 2024 will be the year of predators. It means it will belong to you.
Western culture has the knack – mumbo jumbo – to transform what’s dangerous into what’s delightfully pleasant, encouraging purchases, whetting the appetite for more from life. True, it doesn’t work everywhere, but in major centers, it does. That’s why it’s cooler to live in London, Brussels, Paris, than in Skiroławki or Bronowice Małe.
We’ve been able to fantasize like this for at least half a millennium. Since the time Count Hendrik III van Nassau hung a large painting in his palace on the outskirts of Brussels, brightening conversations during feasts.
In schools, this ability to focus on what’s attractive, within arm’s reach, is called modern culture. They say it drives the economy.
Here’s to focus and success in the economy throughout 2024.
You’ll see! 2024 will be incredible, sit back, watch to your heart’s content, purr with satisfaction – a dilemma worthy of a Danish prince, what to choose: Lifestyle or Shopping?
Under the Christmas tree, one would want both. Both the shimmer and the sound.
But beware! The shimmer is “incomprehensible,” as the carol teaches. The sound of trumpets, joyful, breathless, like the breath of couriers running towards the shimmer, who for a moment abandoned their daily rush. Such a sound is best heard in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium. As for the shimmer, it can be any glow of sol invictus – the sun just reborn, gaining strength.
The same sound and, who knows, perhaps a very similar shimmer will supposedly return in the prelude to the Apocalypse. The same, hard-to-ignore signs in the human imagination can mean what we desire and what we fear. The economy of signs, the economy of semiotics, is a field full of paradoxes.
