Deepening Depths

That innocence is to be feared. "Everything is permitted," exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of the absurd. But on condition that it not be taken in the vulgar sense. I don't know whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out it is not an outburst of relief or joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact. The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are different, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 50.

Only when we feel that a story tells us more than just some perculiar happening, that it shows us through the singular story a generally human or epochal condition, when by its piercing vividness it touches the human core in us; only when a picture, even a portrait, reaches through the individual form into a conception of the structure of the phenomenal world — only then do these images attain to the sphere of art.
— Erich Kahler, "The Nature of the Symbol," VI, in Symbolism in Religion and Literature, Rollo May (ed.), p. 69.

The assertion often found at the beginning of creeds originating in our time that they deal not with belief but with scientifically based knowledge, thus contains an inner contradiction and rests on a self-deception.
— Werner Heisenberg, "The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics," in Ibid., p. 230.

Now therefore it is clear and plain that neither times past nor times future have any being. Nor may it properly be said that there are three times: past, present, and to come. But peradvanture it might properly be said that there are three times thus: a present time of things past, a present time of things present, and a present time of things future.
— St. Augustine, Confessions of St. Augustine, Book XI, Chapter 20.

[Speaking of T. S. Eliot's Waste-Land] The force of this poetic myth is the suggestion of its universality. Yet if we look at it more carefully, we see that it is not, in fact, universal. Not only is it Eliot's own personal synthesis, rather than the myth of a people, but also it is a myth of and for modern man, a sophisticated mosaic with eight pages of footnotes in five languages. The assent that it claims is not that of immediate experience and response, but of the interrelationships of meaning suggested by multifarious allusions and ironic contrasts. Hence, it is the exact opposite of what myth has always been to those among whom it has arisen — an immediate, dramatic presentation of a unique event. It belongs, rather, to that, modern myth-mongering — to coin a phrase — which substitutes the secondary meaning derived from the similarity of myths in different times and places for the direct meaning of the myth taken by itself that was available to ancient man. The myth-monger asks us to accept a rich sense of everything having significant relation to everything else in place of any immediate insight into any particular event of reality. The modern myth that is created in this way is a confession of the absence of meaning: in the end, it betrays its own nihilism.
— Maurice Friedman, "Images of Inauthenticity," in To Deny Our Nothingness, p. 37.

Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two foci. Facts are one, ideas are the other.
— Victor-Marie Hugo, Les Miserables, Vol. 2, Part IV, Book VIII, p. 207.