Jammed

“For there is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.”

– John Updike, Self-Consciousness, 1989

“Devil” or “satan” was human’s invention

“When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.”

“And why call all this Satanic?” I asked. “Why not call it chaos? That is all it would be.”

“Because,” she said, “that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn’t they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.”

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“Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic,” she said. “Or what we would call, in our colossal egotism and sentimentality, a decent person. But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws ~be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris~ that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws.”

~Anne Rice
from The Vampire Lestat

Why beauty exists?

“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,” she said, “why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power?”

~Anne Rice
from The Vampire Lestat

Savage Garden

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art ~the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases~ beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

~Anne Rice
from The Vampire Lestat

Do devils love each other, if they exist?

Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” things like that to each other? It was a rather detached intelllectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. But it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn’t it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.

I’d known that all my life. It had terrified me as a child, the idea that I might go to heaven and my mother might go to hell and that I should hate her. I couldn’t hate her. And what if we were in hell together?

~Anne Rice
from The Vampire Lestat