Good stuff!

I doubt these two were the first (or only) people to say this. And it's a very sensible thought once you've seriously entertained it. But the sentiments are so similarly expressed that I wonder if Bulgakov (Bride of the Lamb, 1939) had read this in Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 1921).

It reminds me of something Wittgenstein once said, actually:

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

But at the end of the world, no one will remain to perceive it as an event of this time. The latter is extinguished, to flare up in another way, in a new way."

The end is like death: on this side, for those remaining in the world, death occurs in a given place and at a specific time, whereas for those who die it occurs not in this time but beyond it, beyond the grave, where there are other times and seasons.

On the contrary, this means that that day and that hour cannot, in general, be known, for they do not belong to the time and life of this age, but are beyond its limits.

I think it's the same with "enchantment." Step one is just to start taking things seriously that the modern, "scientific" world says aren't real – your conscience, your dreams, your faith.

If you do it right, you'll quickly forget about the whole "re-enchantment" business.

Want to be cool? Stop trying to be cool.

Want to make real friends? Stop people-pleasing.

Want to get rich? Stop obsessing over money.

And I think most of us moderns completely lack the mythic imagination to make actual "enchantment" possible, anyways (especially insofar as that entails an unconsidered repudiation of all things "modern," without which we are, for better or worse, totally untethered).

You can't "re-enchant" the world by trying to "re-enchant" the world. Just like you can't be an actual "trad" by trying to be "trad."

(I don't actually like Chesterton very much, but the quote is good.)

The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases, no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could possibly say what was the matter with it."