Roland in Moonlight

by David Bentley Hart

On the one hand, you’re an aesthete, acutely devoted to the beauty of this world, almost to the point of hedonism. On the other hand, you suffer from an almost morbid obsession with suffering and death, and the suffering and death of the innocent—of children and animals—in particular. So for you this world is sometimes a radiant symbol of a higher world, a symbol caught for a time in the shadowy trammels of mortality and delusion and sin, but shining brightly amid the darkness even so. At other times, however, it’s simply a sporadically lovely mask dissembling an absolute abyss of elemental violence and idiot fate. Sometimes you see it as the glorious prelude to something unimaginably good, and sometimes as something absolutely alien to the true good from which we’ve all been exiled. You love nature—love creation—but something in you also hates the world.”