Faith & Spirit Quote by Russell Hoban

Hoban turns the tidy, secular word "idea" into something almost bodily and dangerously holy: an eye installed in us, not to look at the world, but to look back toward its source. The move is sly. He borrows the language of revelation and makes it psychological, suggesting that thinking is less like having opinions and more like acquiring new organs of perception. An idea does not simply add information; it changes what counts as real.

The second sentence is where the quote bites. If ideas are eyes, then rejecting an idea is not a polite disagreement; it is self-mutilation. "We cannot bear to look out of" frames certain insights as unbearable not because they're complex, but because they're intimate. Some perceptions make demands: moral responsibility, spiritual awe, grief, wonder, the recognition of our own smallness. Hoban implies that the most threatening ideas are the ones that enlarge our vision past the comfortable scale of the ego. You don't refute them; you flinch.

Calling the eye "given by God" also works as a provocation. Even for nonbelievers, "God" here functions as a name for ultimacy, the thing beyond our mental models. The subtext: people claim to prize open-mindedness, but there are whole categories of seeing we treat as intolerable - the kind that rearrange your life, not just your arguments. Hoban, a novelist steeped in mythic and post-apocalyptic imagination, understands that the mind protects itself the way the body does. When vision hurts, we reach for darkness and call it clarity.