"...if a way to the Better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the Worst." — Thomas Hardy

Union desires the ideal.
The ideal, being untenable, victimizes the real.
The real as victim is melancholia.
Melancholia, then, is the loss of the ideal.
The ideal, never being real, is the phantom,
The phantom that confers melancholia.
Lay the phantom? O, Buddhahood
In The Land of Ubiquitous Technology and Reason,
You yourself are now the phantom —
Laying the phantom becomes the phantom.