What should they regard as too obscene?

From That Hideous Strength:

Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists: indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. ... Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. ... What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment.

Day 22: Rose on the ash heap

Yesterday my BP pointed me at Owen Barfield's reflections on the Christian imagination, and thank goodness he did. I've been gradually losing myself over the past weeks, and reading a few papers on this subject brought me back to who I am.

Thank God for him. I needed rescue.

One of Barfield's fictional pieces is called The Rose on the Ash-Heap. Here is a segment from that piece which I found compelling:

"'...among the sooty weeds struggling up out of the refuse on the Ash-Heap', a garden Rose is growing. Like imagination and love in the modern world, this Rose was 'a sad and spindly-looking object with one dull red knob at the top, yet there was some magic in the twilight which attracted Sultan's attention to it. It was now nearly dark, and many stars had already appeared in the sky. Sultan looked at the flower again. Yes, it was glowing! It seemed to be giving forth a light of its own into the dusk!... And at last Sultan realized that it was not merely glowing but also singing to him. It was singing something like this:

Earth despairs not, though her Spark
Underground is gone--
Roses whisper after dark
Secrets of the Sun.

That got me thinking about how Seal's song Kissed by a Rose echoes this theme. Probably disconnected, but perhaps not.

Either way, it got me to try something new; I bought my first iTunes song, despite having had an iPod for several years.

And it rescued me from the doldrums in which I'd been wallowing.