Sublime

Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.

One of the ironies of the creative process is that it partly cripples itself in order to function. I mean that, usually, in order to turn out a piece of work the author has to exaggerate the emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way to other versions of truth; and he gets carried away by his own exaggeration, as his distinctive i

“The modern man is always claiming a self-sufficiency which he is unable to achieve. He constantly compares himself with other people and, afraid that they might be superior, he secretly copies their manners and borrows their desires.”

Eventually he concluded that even in the worst pain, humans can choose to infuse meaning into their experiences, saying, “what is to give light must endure burning.”

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars. One

So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.”

I am a father not because I will die but because I am committed to my child, which makes me answerable for what I do as a father and gives me reasons for acting. My practical identity as a father and my reasons for acting can only matter, however, against the horizon of my death. To have a reason for acting is to have a priority and the urgency of