A pastoral lifestyle is lived according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture, depicted through art in an idealized manner, typically for urban audiences.

Even before the Alexandrian age, ancient Greeks had sentiments of an ideal pastoral life that they had already lost.

In the late 19th century, city dwellers were worried that the unnatural pace of life brought on by railroads and telegraphs had given rise to a new disease, neurasthenia.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change. Man remains just the same. Civilized and cultured people live with exactly the same interests as the most ignorant savages. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words. But all these fine words about progress and civilization are merely words.

aristasia

• Atomisation: The divide-and-rule tendency of the Pit, which seeks to isolate each individual by the clever use of the doctrine of "personal independence". By undermining and uprooting all natural loyalties, whether to family, religion, nation, custom or tradition, each individual is cut off from all sources of support and sustenance outside the cathode-defined "reality" of the Pit.
• Bongo: A dweller in the Pit, one deeply affected by the ethos of the Pit. Bongos are Children of the Pit, shaped by the specific contents of the Pit, by its distortions and neuroses, by its attempts to escape its ownugliness through 'alternative' uglinesses, or its attempts to find rest inconformity to the 'standard' ugliness, or any of the thousand mix-and-match permutations of Pit-poisoning.
• Deformism: The moral and aesthetic inversion of the Pit, the continual urge to pollute and parody anything real and to destroy any racinated image by adulterating it with deracinated elements.
• Deracination: The process of cutting off an individual and a society from all natural roots. Creating a rootless, atomised type of humanity which, by its divorce from, and induced forgetfulness of, all normal standards and values, lacks dignity and self-respect. The "freedom" of the deracinated individual is limited to accepting the various "alternatives" permitted by the definers of reality.
• Ordinator: The Aristasian word for "computer".
• Racination: The reverse of deracination. It is the process (or rather processes) by which we can undo the damage which the Pit has done to us, regain our stolen innocence and revive our trampled joy and wonder.
• Vintesse: Province of Aristasia corresponding to the 1920s.
• The Eclipse: The cultural and spiritual collapse of the early 1960s. Civilisation proper ended at this time and the Void (or the Pit) took its place.
• The Pit: The deracinated contents of the post-Eclipse world, the psychotic pseudo-reality created by the Eclipse, or the world of the late 20th century.
• The Void: Refers to the post-Eclipse world's utter emptiness of anything of value or interest, just as the sea is void of fresh water or the desert void of everything but sand. The Void is the Pit as seen from within Aristasia, simply a yawning nothingness, defined not by what it is, but by what it is not.

• Aristasia History
• Paris Syndrome