142 struggling with the worldsociety that we shall never encounter, nor the evocation, in high and
pop u lar culture, of a greater existence, ecstatically separated from the
tenor of our daily aff airs, suffi ces to quiet our anguish. We suff er a dis-
tance, an estrangement, from our present experience, although this
experience continues to be the sole good that we can hope to possess
with certainty. Th e value of the present is discredited by contrast to the
good that remains beyond our reach because it is projected into the
future— into a future beyond the boundaries of the time allotted to us.
So we face death, aroused and disappointed, the only sure good having
been stolen from us by our faith in a good that eludes our grasp.
From this inner estrangement we attempt to escape by means of Pro-
metheanism: that is to say, by seeking power and invulnerability and by
denying that we are the mortal, groundless, and insatiable beings that
we seem to be. It is a false escape, beginning in self- deception and end-
ing in the entanglement and paralysis of the self in an anxious quest for
dominion over others.
Everything in the canonical beliefs of the struggle with the world
would make this experience of estrangement and homelessness unnec-
essary, misguided, and even evil. It amounts to an apostasy from the
message of ascent to a greater life. Th e experience nevertheless persists,
revealing a truth that the established beliefs would suppress. Th is sense
of exile from the present precedes the ideas that could explain its
sources and explore its signifi cance for what we could and should do
next. Here is the dialectic of engagement and transcendence, manifest
in the realm of inner and partly wordless and thoughtless life.
Not even in our most intimate experience are we ever entirely hos-
tage to the social and conceptual worlds that have helped shape us.
Th ey may direct us over much of our lives, but they do not own us. Th e
spell that they cast on our experience is never complete. At any moment,
we can break it.
Th e arrangements of society and of thought can be so or ga nized as
to either tighten or loosen the noose in which they hold us. Th ey can
either lengthen or shorten the distance between our ordinary context-
preserving activities and our extraordinary context- revising moves,
and make change more or less dependent on crisis. Th ey can make it
either easier or harder for us to combine the characters of the insider
and the outsider and engage a structure of life or of thought without