The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular; a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view — and in this view alone — never for despair!

Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair — the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind — that’s our affair!

And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe, reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth–a task in which fate had perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion, and the illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.

~ Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record