Progress, in its final incarnation, was the rationalization of pleasure, the pursuit of gratification by material means, and that pursuit in turn was the expression of a despair so profound it could be felt only as a longing for death. Divorced materially, intellectually, and spiritually from the natural world, modern man was enclosed in the artifice of his cities, whose lights against the night sky resembled nothing so much as the glitter of scales in a fishnet: . . . .

The "net" of the city, like the purse seine, scoops men up from their native element; it jostles them together so that none can stand alone yet none are truly linked; its glow is the shimmer of decay. Jeffers had deployed the image of the net previously to describe the consequences of a culture built upon narcissism, most notably in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy": "the net of desire / Had every nerve drawn to the center, so that they writhed like a full draught of fishes, all matted / In the one mesh." Urbanization was the outer symptom, the public manifestation of this collapse upon the self. The tightening web of community created isolation within dependence, enlarging the sense of self while destroying the scope of free activity, as narcissism and anomie reinforced each other in a self-perpetuating cycle.