“If the scientist is the prince of the post-religious age, lord and sovereign of the Cosmos itself through his transcendence of it, the artist is the suffering servant of the age, who, through his own transcendence and his naming of the predicaments of the self, becomes rescuer and savior not merely to his fellow artists but to his fellow sufferers.”

—Lost in the Cosmos; I only wish you could read this line in its full context so you could hear the self-irony and steel. Walker Percy is one of the modern geniuses of what I think Harold Bloom first called “self-overhearing.”