"You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage"
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Man, in Morris West's telling, is forever split-screen: half animal, half metaphysician, shuttling between the blunt facts of survival and the unkillable urge to make meaning. The image does a lot of work quickly. "Two worlds" isn’t just body versus soul; it’s the everyday realm of appetite, politics, and compromise set against an interior theater where guilt, awe, and longing play out with disproportionate intensity. West chooses "caught" to deny the reader any fantasy of clean resolution. This is not a celebration of transcendence so much as a diagnosis of an inescapable condition.
The cave-wall metaphor sharpens the point. Those drawings are the earliest art we can imagine, but West insists they aren’t merely decorative or documentary. They are records of "wonders" and "nightmare experiences" - the sublime and the traumatic - suggesting that culture begins as coping mechanism as much as it is achievement. The "spiritual pilgrimage" language, in West's mid-century Catholic-inflected universe, implies motion without guaranteed arrival: faith as journey, not victory lap. He’s attentive to how spirituality can enlarge the self and also terrify it; revelation and dread share a border.
Context matters: West wrote in a century that watched ideologies become religions and religions collide with modernity's brutal evidence. His novels often circle priests, crises of conscience, and institutions straining under doubt. The subtext is that human beings don’t just live history; they narrate it on the nearest wall, because otherwise the darkness wins.
The cave-wall metaphor sharpens the point. Those drawings are the earliest art we can imagine, but West insists they aren’t merely decorative or documentary. They are records of "wonders" and "nightmare experiences" - the sublime and the traumatic - suggesting that culture begins as coping mechanism as much as it is achievement. The "spiritual pilgrimage" language, in West's mid-century Catholic-inflected universe, implies motion without guaranteed arrival: faith as journey, not victory lap. He’s attentive to how spirituality can enlarge the self and also terrify it; revelation and dread share a border.
Context matters: West wrote in a century that watched ideologies become religions and religions collide with modernity's brutal evidence. His novels often circle priests, crises of conscience, and institutions straining under doubt. The subtext is that human beings don’t just live history; they narrate it on the nearest wall, because otherwise the darkness wins.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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