The author is Karen Armstrong, former nun, historicist of religions. (Like Captain Jack, she can get you high tonight.)

We've lost the ability to think (if "think" is the right word) mythically. She says, at the end of her book, that artists and writers can perhaps help us to return to this lost way of experiencing the world.

The surrealists worried about this loss, too (if, that is, the surrealists can be said to have "worried" about anything).

There is a nightingale in the middle of a thick wood. It sings though its throat is torn out. No children go there to play or to be menaced. They know better, or they have lost the instinct of being drawn to life-illuminating danger.

This is the nightingale's song:

I think, though I am now a bird, that I was once a child. I can't remember what I thought, when I stood on the carpet and looked around at the sea of legs belonging to adults. Even their legs were taller than I was.

I can't imagine that I went on to grow up. I can't imagine that I made decisions that affected the fate of oceans, that influenced tribal wars on the other side of the globe. I don't believe that I broke someone's heart and then lied about it.

The nightingale listens to the echo of its song coming toward it on the dusk.