When I was very little, maybe four or five, I read the children's version of the Greek

mythologies.

And quickly the Greek gods became my favorite gods, and I decided that if I was going to believe

in a god, I would prefer to believe in those.

I think I've named my first pet Hermes after the Greek messenger god, who was also the

god of thieves and lawyers.

The thing I loved about the Greek gods were that they were extra human.

There were gods, there were mortal and all of that, but they had all of the characteristics

and all the voyables of human beings.

They would get angry, they would get jealous, they would cheat, they would steal, they

would lie.

There was this notion of this is all somehow wonderful.

Wonderful in part because it just is, it's inescapable.

We can be better, we can have our better days, our worst days, we can have our better representatives

of our species, our worst representatives of our species.

But the point is that we are all of these things.

We have to on some level accept that.

Not just accept it as, well I guess this is unfortunately the way it is, but maybe it's

part of the thing itself.

The pyramids had a body count.

Cathedrals have a body count.

In our aspirations towards a kind of magnificence, towards a kind of transcendence of ourselves,

...