Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/405
The Catholic would argue, “You see, you admit a three-quarter saint who can do without sex. How do you account for that?” To which I would answer that it is a riddle although probably not insurmountable, but that it is certainly less of a riddle than that there is a God who gave Life[1] but immediately ceded the dispensing of life and the life energies over to a Devil. That is the total contradiction on which S rests, but it is so exhausting, so static, that until H began to express itself as Reason in the early Renaissance, Western slumbered in shit—giving snores of torture.
note
- ↑ An early, rudimentary statement of Mailer’s belief in a divided universe, a semi-gnostic vision discussed at length first in a 1959 interview, “Hip, Hell and the Navigator” (collected in Advertisements for Myself), and most fully in a series of conversations with J. Michael Lennon in On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007).