The art of living with dissonance is as much about coping with the scars on the soul as it is about avoiding them. Just as Odysseus had to steer his ship between Homer’s mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis—embodiments of rocky shoals and a whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, both perilous to sailors—so we must find a path between the Scylla of blind self-justification on one side and the Charybdis of merciless self-flagellation on the other.
