As it has been, and apparently ever shall be, gods, superseded, become the devils in the system which supplants their reign, and stay on to make trouble for their successors, available, as they are, to a few for whom magic has not despaired, and been superseded by religion.
Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer sun, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly up the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking. Slightly offended by Bach and Palestrina, short memories reached back, struggling toward Origen, that most extraordinary Father of the Church, whose third-century enthusiasm led him to castrate himself so that he might repeat the hoc est corpus meum, Dominus, without the distracting interference of the rearing shadow of the flesh. They looked; but he was nowhere about, so well had he done his work, and the churches were so crowded that many were forced to suffer the Birth in cocktail lounges, and bars. So well had Origen succeeded, sowing his field without a seed, that the conspiracy, conceived in light, born, bred in darkness, and harassed to maturity in dubious death and rapturous martyrdom, continued. Miserere nobis, said the mitered lips. Vae victis, the statistical heart.
Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.
—William Gaddis
—found in The Recognitions (1952; this edition 2012)