Tonight's the night, for the sinners and the saints. Two worlds collide, in a beautiful display.

I am not become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least, not as to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of Humanity - for although I wish my fellow men well, and find them endlessly interesting, yet there are more things in Heaven and Earth than were created for their, that is our, benefit. The impulses to religion might be the need to trust - or the capacity for wonder - and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter. I find it hard to shift without the Creator - the more we see and understand, the more amazement there is in this strangely interrelated heap of things - which is yet not disordered...

...The truth is - my dear Miss LaMotte - that we live in an old world - a tired world - a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning - by young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos - are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision - as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one - or we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient minsters and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress. Now I cannot believe, being no Manichee, that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world that which we are. He made us curious, did he not? - he made us questioning - and the Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur - in some sense - to good. To good and evil. We have more of both those, I must believe, than our primitive parents.

Now, my great question is, has He withdrawn Himself from our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out his Ways - now so far away from us - or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis - have we reached some stage which necessitates our consciousness of our ignorance and distance - and is this necessity health or sickness?

- "Randolph Henry Ash's letter" in Possession, A. S. Byatt