the vanitas project / touchstones and inspirations
“We always knew that there was something peculiar about humanity, something deep down that characterized us and set us apart from the other animals.”
-Ernest Becker
“This is the paradox: we are out of nature and hopelessly in it; we are dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.”
-Ernest Becker
“Our insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxieties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty, majesty, awe, mystery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols.”
-Ernest Becker
“Humans are not just blind globs of idling protoplasm, but creatures with names who live in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter.”
-Ernest Becker
“Humans are literally split in two: we have an awareness of our own splendid uniqueness in that we stick out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet we go back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”
-Ernest Becker
“Everything that humanity does in its symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome our grotesque fate.”
-Ernest Becker
