Whenever we are seized with vertigo at the ceaseless shuttling and spinning in our mind of the thought: What is play? What is serious? We shall find the fixed, unmoving point that logic denies us, once more in the sphere of ethics……
At the end of this magnificent piece of historical/anthropological writing we are also afforded a look at the universal small town intellectual mindscape of an average middleclass ‘cornerstone of society’. The blinkered vision of the nineteenth century accepted views of ‘what is’ and ‘how it is’ without any trace of doubt about any of it, had to become the object of future generations of iconoclastic playful antics to tear off these contraptions and let play back into the mindscape, starting with the birth of DaDa and continuing for every generation under a different disguise. It now is performance art, or ‘art as play’ that seems to act as a leaven in the dough of present un-playing civilization, a commodity that we all have to take in and endure, together with the air we breath, and endure the pollutions until those are replaced by play some time in the future. 