a generation of wingless chickens

If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe....I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable....[I]f you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it....It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

—Flannery O'Connor, Letters (1955)

Nothing more would beckon.

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. What if it were proved — absolutely and purely — that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. . . . Would it help . . . [t]o argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation?

—Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

'something commensurate to his capacity for wonder'

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

'a high price for living too long with a single dream'

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . .

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Everywhere was nowhere.

The wilderness was massive. It was a place, Wade came to understand, where lost was a rule of thumb. The water here was the water there. Nothing in particular, all in general. Forests folded into forests, sky swallowed sky. The solitude bent back on itself. Everywhere was nowhere. It was perfect unity, perfect oneness, the flat mirroring waters giving off exact copies of other copies, everything in multiples, everything hypnotic and blue and meaningless, always the same. Here, Wade decided, was where the vanished things go.

—Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

Mysticism Keeps Men Sane

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic .... If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

The closer to paradise...

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

What a Real Living Human Being is Made Of

Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men--each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature--are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.

--Hermann Hesse, Demian (1925)

'the subtle enmity of fame'

Young man anywhere, in whom something stirs that makes you shiver, profit by the fact that no one knows you. And if they contradict you who hold you of no account, and if they give you up entirely whom you frequent, and if they would extirpate you because of your precious thoughts—what is this obvious danger, which holds you concentrated within yourself, against the subtle enmity of fame, later, which renders you innocuous by scattering you?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)

What all the years?

Perhaps it is new, our surviving these: the year and love. Blossoms and fruit are ripe when they fall; animals are self-aware and find each other and are content with this. But we, who have undertaken God, can never finish. We keep putting off our nature, we need more time. What is a year to us? What all the years? Before we have even begun God, we are already praying to him: let us survive this night. And then the being ill. And then love.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)