最初と最後の人間

We are not to set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilites. But we must select with a purpose. The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art, and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have. Yet our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We
We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture. A false myth is one which either violently transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own cultural matrix, or expresses admirations less developed than those of its culture's best vision.