[the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection] is a myth

[soso]

[No one /looking at world history /without some preconception in favor of progress] could find in it a steady up gradient.

There is often progress /within a given field /over a limited period. 

A school of pottery or painting, a moral effort in a particular direction, 

a practical art like sanitation or shipbuilding, 

may continuously improve over a number of years. 

If this process could spread /to all departments of life and continue indefinitely,

there would be “progress” of the sort () our fathers believed in. 

But it never seems to do so. 

Either it is interrupted (by barbarian irruption or the even less resistible infiltration of modern industrialism) 

or else, more mysteriously, it decays. 

[The idea //which here shuts out the Second Coming from our minds],

[the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection],

is a myth,

not a generalization from experience. 

And it is a myth //which distracts us /from our real duties and our real interest. 

It is our attempt to guess the plot of a drama //in which we are the characters. 

* it = a myth

But how can [the characters in a play] guess the plot? 

We are not the playwright, we are not the producers, we are not even the audience. 

We are on the stage. 

[To play well the scenes //in which we are “on”] concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes //that follow it.

* Playwrights are writers who specialize in telling stories for the stage.

From The World's Last Night
Compiled in The Business of Heaven