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| The Escape Artist (1982) |
"I closed the book, opened it again, and finally threw it down. For the first time in my life it all seemed bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without life.
In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. Something similar had happened to this poetry. The ardent aspirations of the heart, laden with earth and seed, had become a flawless intellectual game, a clever, aerial and intricate architecture.
... The human element is brutish, uncouth, impure--it is composed of love, the flesh and a cry of distress. Let it be sublimated into an abstract idea, and, in the crucible of the spirit, by various processes of alchemy, let it be rarefied and evaporate."
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Red and the Black, Stendhal (M-H B)