Michael Shindler > Quotes

“To become what it is now art required a great sacrifice: the aesthetic paradigm that had given man all his most beautiful things.”
― Michael Shindler

“The Tower of Babel is one of those mythological narratives that, in the words of the 4th-century philosopher Sallustius, 'never happened, but always are.' Man in his arrogance always strives against his own nature and circumstances to bring together the different nations of the world and establish an order that can facilitate some lofty ideal and he always fails. Just as Nimrod’s tower fell, so did Alexander’s, Cyrus’s, Attila’s, and Napoleon’s. This sort of geopolitical project—even when buttressed by the best reasons and most noble goals—never succeeds.”
― Michael Shindler

“We're forgetting each plant's proper naming,
Classifications we've learnt from reading;
We stop recalling the links and logic,
Accounts of the world's internal working,
And I wonder—do you hear strange music?”
― Michael Shindler

“The Greeks produced lively portraits and the aesthetes living ones, but perhaps we will be the first generation to wholly abandon the portrait in favor of life itself.”
― Michael Shindler

“But as soldiers sometimes go on in spite of their own understanding, so do we and as we do, like soldiers, we look upon the dead and wonder at the meaning of it all.”
― Michael Shindler

“Whereas the pagans of yore groped after mystery in all the strange beauty of the world, the pagans of the 20th century, having supplanted nature with factories, saw the glimmer of the transcendental only in themselves. Hence, their longing for mystery—union in one sacred body, absolute order, and submission to an omnipotent lord—was manifested in an obscene eidolon palpable, for instance, in the Nazi motto, 'ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
― Michael Shindler

“Secular faith is sensible insofar as it is explicable, but religious faith by being inexplicable demonstrates its absolute sensibility.”
― Michael Shindler

“Little stirs people to write as much as death’s approach.”
― Michael Shindler

“In a capitalist economy such as ours, money is the fuel of freedom. To take so much of it away from taxpayers to fund military bloat, which is neither necessary nor beneficial, is to not only deprive them of some good or service, but to deprive them of their choice, which is the essence of liberty.”
― Michael Shindler

“As in a longstanding civil war—art, religion, and all the other foot soldiers of history march with feet rising in contradiction and falling to the drumbeat of reconciliation toward a shared fate: a final battle and a final peace.”
― Michael Shindler

“Secular life, like an unfertilized egg, is ever-pregnant with a strange hollowness.”
― Michael Shindler

“Early on in our national development, we were a nation of open frontiers, a giant ocean-to-ocean project to root the rarified ideals of the Enlightenment in real soil. Today, there are no more uncharted territories for the descendants of Lewis and Clark to explore. Our maps are detailed and our borders defined.”
― Michael Shindler

“Abraham Lincoln described America as a 'nation conceived in Liberty' and our capitalist system is a consequence of that devotion to liberty: we are not free in order to engage in trade, rather we engage in trade because we are free to do so.”
― Michael Shindler

“A great ox like a hill in a barren field
Standing black against the dawn
With body once broken, now healed,
With silver-mended horns and brawn:

He pushed past the sun
And the mountains, unplowed immensities,
And with his silver won
A briar-crown of vanities.”
― Michael Shindler, Fret Not

“To make America’s least employable citizens dependent on the whims of the state, rather than their neighbors, is to clear a path for demagogues.”
― Michael Shindler

“Dreams offer us all those things which our lives deny and by their extravagance, dull our daily denials.”
― Michael Shindler

“With deft dialectical (and literary) skill Plato, whenever necessary, abstracts and rarifies mortal beauty into a matter of proportion, suitability, and truth until it becomes “that other beauty,” which conveniently resembles the nature of the good, which is also these things. But in the process of abstraction—in trying to find the face of beauty beyond the world of experience—what is lost is exactly that which makes the beautiful so. Indeed, whenever we chance to glimpse at beauty in the course of life, it never appears with a plaintiff or veil, but always in an easy grandeur.”
― Michael Shindler

“And seeing that it was almost morning
I too began to depart when I heard
Ever so faintly the whole of the thing:
The water and the wind roving northward
And the muffled motions of the city
Choiring in an inhuman counterpoint
So indescribably strange-yet-welcome
And full of free glory
That as I strained to hear these songs conjoint
The sun arose and I was overcome.

(From "Ode to the Potomac")”
― Michael Shindler

“Hear of this from a mouth that smiled;
Hear this from the mouth of a child.”
― Michael Shindler, Fret Not

“A theology that can function as an aesthetic makes for a religion that worships the beautiful at the expense of all else and an aesthetic that can function as a theology makes for an art that is expressive only of goodness.”
― Michael Shindler

“The germ containing an inverted reflection of contemporary art and Christianity is discernible in the historical conflation of the good and the beautiful. Though it is nowadays evident that what is good is not always beautiful and vice versa—a distinction perhaps best illustrated in Christian art by the contrast between depictions of Christ, scourged and gruesome, with depictions of Lucifer, radiant and alluring—the notion still lingers. Even nowadays, it is tempting when faced with such contrasting images to revert: to instinctually reimagine Christ in shining brilliance and Lucifer in gory horror. But this stems from a fundamentally pagan impulse: to search for Christ in the guise of a hastily baptized Apollo is to bend to the charm of the very contradiction which Christianity itself reconciles.”
― Michael Shindler

“Plato’s heirs—armed with his methods, but unchained from his wistful predilections—abstracted away the faces of the pagan gods: the marbles that in Homer’s day were warm Olympian flesh were philosophized into dust and that dust into theology. Consequently, the labor of keeping beauty and goodness yoked became moot as their separation in the realm of experience, in art and religion—their correspondent spheres of human activity—became so obviously distinct. Christianity supplanted paganism and the art of yore, which had formerly been principally confined to civil and religious expression, was gradually supplanted by an art that was its own unique means by which humanity understood itself. In due course, following the birth of Romanticism, art stood on the field of history its own inexorable self.”
― Michael Shindler

“As men require a heaping dose of dreams to reconcile themselves to waking life, so too does the hulking Leviathan of society require its dreams—which are films.”
― Michael Shindler

“The would-be brute, by dreaming of medieval bloodbaths, finds himself uninterested in mere parking lot brawls and the would-be lothario, by dreaming of Sadean spoilations, loses his interest in venturing so mild a thing as an unsolicited kiss. In this way, dreams offer us all those things which our lives deny and by their extravagance, dull our daily denials.”
― Michael Shindler