Life & Mortality Quote by Kenneth Rexroth

Humans, Rexroth suggests, are built for the in-between: not the antiseptic heaven of pure feeling, not the blunt mud of pure appetite, but the unstable middle where contradiction is oxygen. The line works because it stages a grotesque little thought experiment and makes “man” the only creature capable of surviving it. Angels, overloaded on ecstasy, short-circuit; pigs, repulsed by refinement, refuse the meal. Humanity alone has the adaptive stomach for paradox.

The subtext is less “people are great” than “people are compromised,” and Rexroth means that as a strange compliment. To thrive where an angel would collapse is not spiritual superiority; it’s tolerance for mixed motives, the capacity to metabolize both beauty and filth without pretending either one cancels the other. That’s a poet’s anthropology: we’re not saved by purity but by range. Ecstasy isn’t a sustainable diet. Disgust isn’t a philosophy. Human life is negotiation.

Context matters: Rexroth came up through political radicalism, wartime disillusionment, and the postwar American scene that fed the San Francisco Renaissance. He distrusted sanitized pieties as much as he distrusted brutish complacency. So the image reads like a jab at anyone selling total solutions: the mystic who wants to float above the body, the cynic who insists the body is all there is. Rexroth’s human survives precisely by refusing those exits, staying in the world’s messy weather and calling it livable.