THE DEVIL TAKE IT

The Faustian bargain has quite a history—and future.

- JAMES WOOD

How many who piously lament the "disenchantment" of the secular world would have been able to bear ordinary life in, say, seventeenth-century Europe? We are bereft, the elegy goes, because modern knowledge has stripped us of ancient magic. We can't wander like our ancestors in the spirit-filled woods, or hear the music of the spheres, because the sacred spaces became concrete deserts. The cathedrals were displaced by malls. To "understand" the solar system, the charge continues, is to be dead to it. No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and buttressed, marching eficiently through our merely material world, grim-faced assassins of mystery.