I was just thinking about the lyrics to the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah, which was written some 20+ years ago but in the news recently because it was both the #1 and the #2 song in Britain, simulaneously, in different releases. Oh, looks like there's thousands of versions of it on YouTube, so I think I'm justified in saying it --- well, struck a chord.
My thought is that it's a good song, actually, and speaks about the profound human contact --- contact --- and transcendance that can be the inner experience of intercourse. It evokes love, loyalty, wonder, gratitude; it's a privileged metaphor for the touch and embrace of Divine love, a metaphor found in the Scriptures of many civilization-generating faiths, as well, of course, as in Leonard Cohen.
The sense is, that this is what it is supposed to be; this is what ennobles persons, what is solidly deep-down right---
and what falls short of this is, in Cohen's words, "cold," "broken," "it all went wrong," -- sad and disappointing.
That's what we sense where our intellect and our affect and what-we've-always-been-longing-for come together. A fucking shame, you might say.
Others have written well about the depressing spectacle of disease and dead babies and all that as a result of truncated sex, junk sex--- yes, it's true --- but there's also the cancer of loneliness and the callousing of souls.
In the light of which, the decline of your civilization seems an afterthought, something you hardly notice.
Malachi 2
13 And this have ye done again, covering the altar of the LORD with tears, with weeping, and with crying out, insomuch that he regardeth not the offering any more, or receiveth it with good will at your hand.
14 Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.
15 And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.