Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, entry of 30 December 1940, p. 104:
Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? [. . .] There are only two types of humanity . . . the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes , searching, each is his own way, for the absolute; but, of the two, the profligate is to my mind the most [more] mysterious, for he never tires of the only dish served up to him by his appetite and on which he banquets each times as though he had never tasted it before. Probably because of this, I have always had a tendency to consider an immoderate craving for pleasure as an accepted form of madness.
Only two types of humanity? No, but two types. Man is made for the Absolute, and some of us seek it. Mysticism and profligacy are two ways of seeking it. Eschewing the phony and conventional, some of us strive after the really real, τὸ ὄντως ὄν. Some by world-flight, others by immersion in sensual indulgence. An enlightened upward and a deluded downward seeking. The solid and stolid bourgeois type will consider both types of seekers mad. But only those who seek the really real in the pleasures of the flesh are truly mad. They are bound for a hell of their own devising as I suggest in A Theory of Hell. Excerpt:
To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell would then be not as a state of pain but one of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise — think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. On fire with the fire of desire, endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists but will never experience.