Two Coins for the Boatman on the River Styx

" When the fifth veil falls, and with it the illusion of financial worth, individuals might recognise themselves again, might find themselves standing, as if naked among ancient values in a long-lost landscape.
Meanwhile, it can be stated with some validity that for all of the clamorings and phobias that it generates, money barely exists. An abstraction, a symbol, an act of faith, an IOU backed only by a bankers word, money is first and foremost a substitute. The funny part is that it is often a substitute for things that often do not exist.
Both money and art, powered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age, are magic. Rather, money is magic, art is magik. Money is stagecraft, sleight of hand, a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly, the line between the two can be as thin as a dime. What's more, the magicians of capitalizm strengthen their hold on their audience through the manipulation of artistic images.
What is plain is that neither money nor the love of it is the root of all evil. Evil's roots run deeper than that. Anyway, money is not a root. Money is a leaf. Trillions of leaves actually; dense, bushy, dollar-green, obscuring the stars of reality with their false canopy.
Who says that money doesn't grow on trees?
So, as we lie there at the moment of our death, helpless, beyond distraction, electricity stealing out of our brains like a con man stealing out of a sucker's neighborhood, it will occur to many of us that everything we ever did, we did for money. And at that instant, right before the stars blink off, we will, according to what else we may have learned in life, burn with an unendurable regret-- or have us a good silent laugh at our own expense."





Tom Robbins, from "Skinny Legs and All"