Hesse dubbed our time the Feuilletonsperiode.
I guess he just meant the “newspaper era.”
He wasn’t thinking about Facebook,
though feuilleton’s French slang for “talk of the town.”
There was plenty of hilarious
stuff in Feuilletonsperiode
periodicals, I promise you—
even funny cat pictures
just like on Facebook.
What happened was, there was a war,
and certainly also a plague—
discussed endlessly on feuilleton political pages.
Then civilization as we knew it ended—
human culture preserved only in pearl-like holograms
like Princess Leia in Star Wars:
every remaining thing an exaggerated simulacrum
of whatever it might have been in real-time.
That’s what you call a Feuilletonsperiode.
Welcome to Facebook!
