Give us (cries the nature of our race) our gods and
goddesses;
Give us the little fertility icons with their welcoming
breasts
And elongated beckoning lips…
The philosophers leave the world naked and blind and deaf
and mute and relentlessly indifferent,
And the village folk – who refuse a lonely cosmos without
consolation –
Fill it and fill it and fill it
With stone and wood and birds and animals and mammals
And miraculous potions and holy babes and animate carcasses
And magically divine women and magically divine men….
Cynthia Ozick in essay on Ruth
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