'No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world ...'

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands a plank on which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared—I carry them in my beggar's sack. Another shnorrer is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool" (trans. Saul Bellow 1953)

'No book written by someone is his grave.'

For some reason, I wanted expressly to discuss the great philosopher. Nodding my head at the book, I said, "I've been to his grave at Könisberg."

"I'm at his grave right now," said my companion, motioning to the open page.

A strange comparison. Doubtless there was nothing like that written there. Kant's thoughts are alive even now. No book written by someone is his grave, I wanted to believe.

—Arvo Valton, "On the Church Step" (1992), from Estonian Short Stories (trans. Ritva Poom 1996)

one little island in a very dark ocean

Soon, the priest spoke at length of his fears, while the hermit, mender of tents, listened patiently until the sun had begun to leak through the chinks in the west wall to paint glowing shafts in the dusty air.
      “Since the death of the last civilization, the Memorabilia has been our special province, Benjamin. And we’ve kept it. But now? I sense the predicament of the shoemaker who tries to sell shoes in a village of shoemakers.”
      The hermit smiled. “It could be done, if he manufactures a special and superior type of shoe.”
      “I’m afraid the secular scholars are already beginning to lay claim to such a method.”
      “Then go out of the shoemaking business, before you are ruined.”
      “A possibility,” the abbot admitted. “It’s unpleasant to think of it however. For twelve centuries, we’ve been one little island in a very dark ocean. Keeping the Memorabilia has been a thankless task, but a hallowed one, we think. It’s only our worldly job, but we’ve always been bookleggers and memorizers, and it’s hard to think that the job’s soon to be finished—soon to become unnecessary. I can’t believe that somehow.”

—Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Real Suffering

He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: "These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche's had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today."

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1929)

'that exquisite finish'

The grass blades of a meadow a mile off, are so far discernible that there will be a marked difference between its appearance and that of a piece of wood painted green. And thus nature is never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, but always abundant; you always see something, but you never see all.

And thus arise that exquisite finish and fulness which God has appointed to be the perpetual source of fresh pleasure to the cultivated and observant eye; a finish which no distance can render invisible, and no nearness comprehensible; which in every stone, every bough, every cloud, every wave is multiplied around us, for ever presented, and for ever exhaustless. And hence in art, every space or touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false. Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing. . . .

—John Ruskin, “Of Truth of Space,” Modern Painters, I (1843)

The Pictures We Create

"Well, there are many saints I'm particularly fond of-Stephen, St. Francis and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Savior and the Virgin-such utterly lying and false and silly pictures-and I can put up with them just as little as you could with that picture of Goethe. When I see one of those sweet and silly Saviors of St. Fancises and see how other people find them beautiful and edifying, I feel it is an insult to the real Savior and it makes me think: Why did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a picture as silly as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that my own picture of the Savior or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls short of the original, and that the Savior Himself would find the picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly reproductions."

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)

No created mind...

No created mind can by any means possess the capacity to understand all, but as soon as it has discovered a small fragment of what it is seeking, it again sees other things that must be sought for; and if in turn it comes to know these, it will again see arising out of them many more things that demand investigation.

—Origen, On First Principles (214)

The Spirit and Wonder World

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medicine and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. And if we suppose that we can do so ourselves, we must be clear that we can represent this as the attitude of Christian faith only by making the Christian proclamation unintelligible and impossible for our contemporaries.

—Rudolf Bultmann, "The New Testament and Mythology" (1941)

Rationality and the Fabulous Beings

Finally, though, and perhaps a mite perversely, I want to urge the essential sanity of Kirk’s approach to reality. One need not believe in fairies to grasp that there is no good reason why one ought not to do so. To see the world as inhabited by these vital intelligences, or to believe that behind the outward forms of nature there might be an unperceived realm of intelligent order, is simply to respond rationally to one of the ways in which the world seems to address us, when we intuit simultaneously its rational frame and the depth of mystery it seems to hide from us. It may be that the apprehension of such an unseen order, when it comes in the form of folklore about fabulous beings, has been overlaid by numerous strata of illusion—but so what? Everything we know about reality comes to us with a certain alloy of illusion, not accidentally, but as an indispensable condition.

—David Bentley Hart, "The Secret Commonwealth" (2009)

Utopia, Reality, and Truth

Idea and fact, utopia and reality are relative terms which constantly shift from one to the other, and if certain utopias can and must be ignored, it is not because they are utopias, that is, because they have no place in the given external reality or appear in it merely as ideas, but because they are bad ideas; and in this respect not only are they inapplicable within the existing reality, but they also have no legitimate place in the world of ideas.

—Vladimir Soloviev, Critique of Abstract Principles (1877)