Hamlet

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure; but security enough to make fellowships accurst: much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news.

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

And it was at this time in his life that Lewis felt he could go no further. He believed he could no more know God personally than Hamlet could know Shakespeare.

At the center of his analysis was the insistence that modern man, “like Macbeth,” had made an evil decision to trade allegiance to transcendent principles for present gain.