@patwater

When Americans speak of East and West, they usually mean Christendom on one side and Islam or “others” on the other. But as Devdutt Pattanaik reminds us, the line has shifted with every empire and migration. Once it was Rome against Persia. Once it was Greece staring out at India. The West has never been a place so much as an orientation, a set of stories we tell about who we are in contrast to them. That makes the question for us not a matter of maps but of myths. The West is less longitude and more longing. It is the mask we put on to declare what is modern, rational, universal. But behind the mask is a more ancient pattern: the human tendency to divide and define, to draw frontiers where the winds themselves never stop. This is where the Monkey King series begins. From the mountains of China he leaps, carrying old tales of rebellion and trickery, into California—land of freeways, fire, and futuristic techno-kings https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/epics-without-end

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