The Spell of the Sensuous, and, Literature and the Gods

I would say that Literature and the Gods picks up on, and goes a similar direction with, a main premise of The Spell of the Sensuous: humanity doesn't live in the real world anymore. We live in a world of our own construction, based on ideas we came up with to help us deal with, not understand, the real world. Those ideas grew to beliefs to world views and into a world(s) of their own. And they change how we perceive and evaluate everything around us; so much so that we interpret them to be truer than the reality we physically live in.

Calasso says we've written off the myths of our past, but myth still controls us: we just live in a new myth now. On page 71, he quotes Nietzsche's piece "How the 'Real World' Ended up as Fable" from "Twilight of the Gods". I'm tempted to type the whole thing in here... I might do that later...

It's a strange and surprising thing, to take a good look around after reading those books.

One thing that really sticks in my mind is on page 36 of Literature and the Gods. Calasso quotes Leopardi on reason as a lethal power that "renders all the objects to which it turns its attention small and vile and empty, destroys the great and the beautiful and even, as it were, existence itself, and thus is the true mother and cause of nothingness, so that the more it grows, the smaller things get."

But if you call it Reason, it must be reasonable, right?