From his lecture series “The Face of God”:

Only that which is sacred can be desecrated. Hence the habitual desecration of death and sexual love are, I venture to suggest, proofs of their sacred nature. And in a culture which is in full flight from the sacred, the practice of desecration becomes a kind of moral necessity — something that must be constantly performed, and performed collectively, in order to destroy the things that stand in judgement over us. All around us, therefore, we find a relentless habit of ‘objectification’: the display of human beings and their settlements as objects to be consumed and disposed of, the reduction of sex to a relation between body parts, and the display of death in images of crazed destruction, such as those presented in the films of Quentin Tarantino. The rule of the Greek tragic theatre was that death should take place off-stage, to be reported by the chorus or a messenger. It was not squeamishness that dictated this rule (what could be more gruesome than the death of Pentheus as the chorus recounts it in Euripides’ Bacchae?). The rule was dictated by the deep emotions that death invites, the sacred aura of the victim, and the real meaning of tragedy for us, the survivors. In tragedy death is faced; in the violent cinema of today it is defaced. Moreover, we have acquired the habit of defacing not merely the human form but all those aspects of our world in which we recognize that we are called to account.

There is a logic to the things we do, and we often don’t understand what we do. I was reminded of this passage when thinking of the off-screen death of Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men.