One of the things I find remarkable about the literate Greeks and Romans is how much less imagination they had than we do. They are always so quick to return to practical reality. One cannot imagine surrealism arising among them: immediately upon being told of it, one imagines a Roman replying, “but who has time for fantasies like that? There is so much worth doing in the real world already!” And this is the great difference between our age and theirs, between our mindset and theirs: the Greeks and Romans knew how to love the world — as a whole, at once with everything bad and contempible still inside of it. They despised many things, but knew they were inevitable — and worked around them! We, in contrast, after our Christian teachings, seek to deny reality, to pretend it does not exist, to live in fantasy.