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…
Q: Do you regard yourself as a Catholic novelist?
A: Since I am a Catholic and a novelist, it would seem to follow that I am a Catholic novelist.
Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A: Bad.
Q: No, I mean are you liberal or conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean, do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q. How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific Humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e. God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn’t let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q: Grabbed aholt?
A: Louisiana expression.

original linked from picpus.tumblr

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The new society offers few roots in the sense of truly enduring relationships. But it does offer more varied life niches, more freedom to move in and out of these niches, and more opportunity to create one’s own niche, than all earlier societies put together. It also offers the supreme exhilaration of riding change, cresting it, changing and growing with it– a process infinitely more exciting than riding the surf, wrestling steers, playing “knock hubcaps” on an eight-lane speedway, or the pursuit of pharmaceutical kicks. It presents the individual with a contest that requires self-mastery and high intelligence. For the individual who comes armed with these, and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fast-emerging super-industrial social structures, for the person who finds the “right” life pace, the “right” sequence of subcults to join and life style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite.
Undeniably, these grand words do not apply to the majority of men. Most people of the past and present remain imprisoned in life niches they have neither made nor have much hope, under present conditions, of ever escaping. For most human beings, the options remain excruciatingly few.
This imprisonment must–and will– be broken. Yet it will not be broken by tirades against technology. It will not be broken by calls for a return to passivity, mysticism and irrationality. It will not be broken by “feeling” or “intuiting” our way into the future while derogating empirical study, analysis, and rational effort. Rather than lashing out, Luddite-fashion, against the machine, those who genuinely wish to break the prison-hold of the past and present would do well to hasten the controlled-selective-arrival of tomorrow’s technologies. To accomplish this, however, intuition and “mystical insights” are hardly enough. It will take exact scientific knowledge, expertly applied to the crucial, most sensitive points of social control.

-Barbara Wright
from the preface to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style

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