David Milch lecturing a class in ‘Religion, Media and Hollywood’, January 24 2008:

… this paradoxical doubleness of seeming to be both separate from each other, and yet to be able to experience radiating through each other, with no distortion, the universal spirit, is the state of grace; and I would also submit that it is the state of art; that the telling of a story is nothing more or less than the process of the viewer coming to experience what has seemed to be separate entities as informed by a single unity. And in that context, all of the sort of abstract categories of ‘plot’, ‘character’, are subsumed into really what is a religious construct… It’s on all your currency — you’re students, you’re probably broke — you know, e pluribus unum. ‘Out of many, one’

I haven’t thought of it quite like that before.