The gods are fugitive guests of literature.
Interpretation
Literature holds a transient and vital connection to the divine, as if the gods briefly visit through storytelling.
Roberto Calassoβs quote suggests that the essence of gods, or the divine, is captured momentarily in literature. Just as guests experience a temporary stay, so too does the presence of divine inspiration flow through literary works, transforming human experiences into something greater than mere existence. This highlights the importance of literature as a sacred space for exploring themes of human nature and transcendence.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of storytelling in culture.
We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself.
Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches.
Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.
Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.
The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.
I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.
And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
Now architecture consists of order, which in Greek is called taxis ... Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and, as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result.
What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.
If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.
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