I'm reading that this morning because it popped up in the end of a New Yorker article about — of all things — Led Zeppelin:
If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don’t have to do it themselves—which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract—then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony.... [S]urely all kinds of demonic and powerful art, including many varieties of music, both classical and popular, have been created by people who didn’t live demonically. What about Flaubert’s mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art? In Led Zeppelin’s case, the great music, the stuff that is still violently radical, was made early in the band’s career, when its members were most sober. The closer the band got to actual violence, the tamer the music became.
Yes but who is the "famous fictional atheist" and how can I reverse the paraphrase "atrocious human deeds are... the manure for our future harmony"? Oh, I managed to do that.
It's from "The Brothers Karamazov," spoken by Ivan, who's famously atheist:“Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. I have believed, and I want to see for myself, and if I am dead by that time, let them resurrect me, because it will be too unfair if it all takes place without me. Is it possible that I've suffered so that I, together with my evil deeds and sufferings, should be manure for someone's future harmony? I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for.”
