"Our reason has swept everything away. Alone at last, we build our empire upon a desert. How then could we conceive that higher balance in which nature balanced history, beauty, and goodness, and which brought the music of numbers even into the tragedy of blood? We turn our back on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable tragedies have the smell of an office, and their blood is the color of dirty ink.
"That is why it is indecent to proclaim today that we are the sons of Greece. Or, if we are, we are sons turned renegade. Putting history on the throne of God, we are marching toward theocracy, like those the Greeks called barbarians, whom they fought to the death in the waters of Salamis. If we really want to grasp the difference, we must look to the one man among our philosophers who is the true rival of Plato. 'Only the modern city' Hegel dares to write, 'offers the mind the grounds on which it can achieve awareness itself.' We live in the time of great cities. The world has been deliberately cut off from what gives it permanence: nature, the sea, hills, evening meditations. There is no consciousness anymore except in the streets because there is history only in the streets, so runs the decree. And, consequently, our most significant works demonstrate the same prejudice . . .
"It is by acknowledging our ignorance, refusing to be fanatics, recognizing the world's limits and man's, through the faces of those we love, in short, by means of beauty - this is how we may rejoin the Greeks. In a way, the meaning of tomorrow's history is not what people think. It is in the struggle between creation and the inquisition. Whatever the price artists will have to pay for their empty hands, we can hope for their victory."
- Albert Camus, excerpt from the essay "Helen's Exile"