Marathe and Steeply on choosing (Maps and Territory)
Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.
Context
Marathe to Steeply on the mountainside shelf above Tucson, at the philosophical peak of their all-night argument about the Entertainment. His indictment of the U.S.A. reaches for the book's cartographic idiom and points it inward: no chart for finding shelter, a whole nation navigating "in the dark" because somebody threw the map of worship away. Cartography-of-self at its most explicit outside the Eschaton and suicide clusters.