When under the pretence of destroying whatever is artificial -- idealizing rhetoric, the mystical ethics of 'perfection' -- people seek to swamp themselves in the primitive flood of instinct, in whatever is primeval, formless and foul, they may imagine they are recapturing real life but actually they are being swept away by a torrent of waste-matter pouring from the disintegration of the ancient culture and its myths.
10 October 2012
A Torrent of Waste-Matter
Denis de Rougemont, quoted by Laurence Durrell in a letter to Henry Miller on October 24th, 1958, from The Durrell-Miller Letters; 1935-1980 (New York: New Directions, 1988), p. 330:
