"Pascal says that when men become separated from God, two courses present themselves; to imagine that they are gods themselves, and try to behave as such, or, alternatively, to seek for enduring satisfaction in the transitory pleasures of the senses. The one sends them, like Icarus, flying into the bright furnace of the sun, there to perish; the other reduces them to far below the level of the farmyard, where the cows with their soft eyes, and the hens with their shrill cries, and the strutting peacocks and the grunting pigs, down to the tiny darting flies and wasps and insects, all live out whatever span of animal existence is vouchsafed them, under God’s kindly gaze. Men are denied this satisfaction. If they set up as a farmyard, it is a place of dark fantasies and weird imaginings –Prometheus, unbound, chaining himself to the rock, and there, day by day, gorging his own entrails."