City of God

“Does the average astronomer doing his daily work understand that beyond the celestial phenomena given to his study […] that even one’s turn to God cannot alleviate the misery of such profound, disastrous, hopeless infinitude? That’s my question.” 

This question will drive the plot of the book forward, and it remains unanswered by the novel’s end. Throughout, this novel grapples with a sense of awe and scale that narrator-author Everett finds upsetting, and his inability to pin it down is represented by his various fictions and monologues.

“You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as entitlement.”

This quote serves both as Everett justifying his own affair with a married woman and as a larger critique of corporate life, which has become the dominant mode of success in American life.

“The lover, for his part, envisions a grand finale to his enterprise that is so dangerous, so extreme, that he decides his life, heretofore adrift in boredom and alienation and the absence of serious conviction, may now be redemptively reconceived as an art form.” 

Everett here is writing about his own affair in a way that is fictionalized, and so he is subtly condemning his own actions in showing that his own sense of alienation is leading to cruelty toward Moira. He is also making a larger argument for the way humans justify their actions by investing them with a sense of purpose and shape.