If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb.. But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself? .Richard Wright
About This Quote
The following is in response to one of my previous quotes in which I said that man’s efforts to build a civilization are an attempt to keep the part of himself he is afraid of from seeing what he is. I wanted to expand on this theme. This quote is perhaps the most famous of C.S. Lewis’s writings. It has been widely quoted, and it too has been adapted in various ways.
The idea in this passage, according to Lewis, is that man wants to hide the awfulness of the individual self by hiding it behind all sorts of screens, which are merely artificial containers for it. So man builds societies for this purpose, but that society is only a screen, and when the society fails or crumbles, that awfulness comes out into the open again. Whatever takes place within the realm of Society is always there also in the Realm of Spirituality; but its power to harm us does not lie in its materiality but in its spirituality, in its spiritualist effect upon men's thoughts and wills. The Christian Church was no more than an organization which reflected, with a partial truthfulness, what was going on within Christian hearts; and when Christian hearts fell away from Christianity, so did Christian organizations fall away from them. If a person has seen the horror of reality and has had a glimpse of his own vileness and wickedness, he will not be able to smile at other people's follies or laugh at other people's weaknesses because he will see his own wickedness and vileness reflected in them also; from then on he can never laugh at other people's follies again because there will be no other people 'follies' for him anymore.
He has become aware that laughter at folly is folly itself.
Source: The Outsider
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- If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that...
- Maybe man is nothing in particular, ' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time...
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