The Caretakers of the Cosmos Quotes

“As Colin Wilson pointed out decades ago, modern man suffers from what he calls ‘the fallacy of insignificance’, the sense that nothing we do really matters, that life is meaningless, and that, in the long run, ‘you can’t win’.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“The spirit world shuts not its gates. Your mind is closed, your heart is dead.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“Each act of imagination, each moment of creative life stands up to the entire material universe and affirms the reality of meaning against the corroding solvents of entropy, dark matter, or whatever else may be dragging the physical world into oblivion.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“Post-modernism ‘ironises’ out all questions of meaning. It reduces everything to the ‘been there, done that’ mentality, and shrinks the world to a theory of everything that can fit on a T-shirt. It lets us off the hook. We no longer have to be good, just good enough. It lowers the existential bar, and moves the metaphysical goal posts closer, or gets rid of them entirely.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“When one who has a rich mental life sees a thousand things which are nothing to the mentally poor, this shows as clearly as sunlight that the content of reality is only the reflection of the content of our minds’.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“Love responsibility,’ Kazantzakis commands. ‘Say: it is my duty, and my duty alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.’17”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“In an interview, Steinsaltz explained what he meant by his remark. ‘If I want to test a new car, the way that I test it is not on the smoothest of roads, under the best conditions. To have a real road test … I would have to put it under the worst conditions in which there is still hope. I cannot test it by driving it off a cliff, but I can test it on the roughest terrain where I must come to the edge of the cliff and have to stop’. It may seem a homely analogy, but Steinsaltz’s view of creation isn’t far from his ideas about testing cars. Creation, he says, is ‘an experiment in existence’, an ‘experiment in “conquering the utmost case”’. Like testing cars, creation, he believes, ‘would have been pointless unless it was precisely under these difficult circumstances’. Our world, Steinsaltz believes, ‘is on the brink … If it were to be slightly, just slightly, worse than it actually is, then its basic structure would become entirely hopeless’. But Steinsaltz does not believe this is a pessimistic view. ‘If a person sees the world as all pink and glowing, he is not an optimist, he’s just a plain fool. An optimist, on the other hand, is one who in spite of seeing the terrible facts as they are, believes that there can be an improvement’.2 In the Kabbalistic view, this effort of improvement is the work of tikkun.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“Nothing is realised by taking things for granted and accepting the ‘natural standpoint’. It is only by questioning this and asking who we really are, that we discover ourselves and our place in the universe.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“Bryusov’s story is a long gloss on Dostoyevsky’s dictum in Notes From Underground (1864), that if all of life could be arranged logically and rationally, a man would go insane on purpose, just to prove he was free.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“This is an example of what George Steiner calls pursuing ‘the sovereignly useless’, an expression of a drive unique to humans: ‘to be interested in something for its own enigmatic sake,’ which, Steiner argues, ‘may be the best excuse there is for man’.9”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“(We live, as the literary philosopher Erich Heller remarked, in an ‘age of prose’.)”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“All philosophy is homesickness’.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

“Today art, like life, consciousness, and the cosmos, must be ‘explained’, hence the often obscure writings that accompany much contemporary art, and which are also equally in need of explanation.”
― Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World