<<reality, the fall, the need to believe in an age of innocence>>

Of course, I'm with you, mostly. Asking, "what is the Fall," I'm wondering what, given the inherent logic of the story, is it communicating--or I am offering an alternative which better fits my slug-of-Park-Avenue sensibility. I don't bring it up with any first-person urgency. But the urgency of being thrown into the world and too cowardly to throw one's self back out of it is certainly [a] fundamental urgency that is experientially expressed... .

As to "reality," the term, as we use it is quite modern and belongs to a recent model, or mode of apprehending or forming the world. While other modes or models may be invalid within the one whose principle is empirical validity (there's a place for attack!) tends to make us deny them as legitimate on their own terms and in their own time. I don't mean passing for valid, I mean valid. For example, it is generally accepted that petroleum comes from bio mass; there is a competing theory according to which it is a mineral oozing up from somewhere deeper in the Earth. As far as I know, the latter has not been disproven. Either theory is adequate to our interest in petroleum as something useful. It is possible that all our drilling takes place in an incorrect theoretical environment, but, event if that's the case, that environment produces what we want it to. This isn't a great example but the issue, it seems to me, will always be the adequacy of an expression to that which it expresses. I'm gonna cut this "short" here.