The modern world has too much overhead and chaos for genuinely deep literature to emerge often. Great art requires stillness and an incredible clarity of mind, you need a dark blank canvas of a headspace to get lost in, to hold an entire world in, like a bright child who gets caught in their daydreams after school, but coloured by the subtle depths of adulthood and tempered by the tribulations of adolescence. As a society becomes more complex, so too does the mental overhead required to engage with it. Passwords, renewals, i.d., insurance, stocks, the news, gotta call my bank gotta call my bank gotta call my bank, oh fuck now the internet, what the fuck is this guy posting about, what the fucking fuck is an egregore? As society becomes more complex and frenetic our culture does too. Cultural trends live and die in just a few years. Entire highly influential subcultures rise and fall in less than half a decade, influencing an election or two before being subsumed immediately. There's no time for something like a Beowulf to emerge because no culture even lives long enough for its soul to be writ upon the page. There's no room for a poet like the poet of Beowulf to exist because instead of spending his life eating porridge in the monastery and carefully scribing he's busy getting assaulted from all sides with shit like "B2B SAAS" and "MECHAHITLER" and "LADIES RAZORS" and racist algorithms and Pakistani spam calls and a whole host of random shit carefully designed and memetically evolved to rape away as much attention and time from his brain as is physically possible. If there is going to be a Milton or Homer or Dante in our world he'll be some sort of sheltered pampered adventurous NEET. Someone who has lived enough to have a soul but hidden from the world enough to winnow his mind down to a clarity. Someone schizoid enough to look at the culture without being devoured by it. More likely, there won't be. Until this society collapses and a new world takes its place, our deepest literature is going to be fragmentary and brief. Like a kaleidoscope of stained glass the soul of you and me and everyone else in this shifting sands of a culture will be revealed in pieces and shards scattered in the void, like this very post. Perhaps that will prove a rich enough tapestry in the end.