Paul A. Bové

“If there is one satisfactory mode, it is in the intermixture of art and criticism, of creativity and curiosity, which is the essential way to love and think such dense and rich human experience. It is the poetic attitude, shadowed closely by its critical child, which alone together sustain the species. The melancholics have forgotten or betrayed poiesis, limiting it the display of the unbearable.
Nevertheless, this bleakness about life, the inability to stand in the face of finitude's complexities that this reflects, betrays the species' fundamental quality of mimesis, of imagination as part of the answer to the human question. The consequences of this inability have been dire for intellectual life; it does not have confidence that imagination can, in the here and now, achieve an albeit always limited victory in struggle. Bleakness and weakness live in the allegorical, in the infinite deferral of hope over a utopian horizon. Committed to ruin, it cannot see or accept the hard truths of limit, love, and beauty. Therefore, it impoverishes the human, its capacities, and its challenges. It devalues its creations, their beauties, and their successes - simply because none of them is final, apocalyptic, erasure of the finitude that makes the secular world. It not only crystallizes the work of imagination in one key but condemns the imagination to the endless iteration of the same monotone. For the melancholics, bleakness is all.”
― Paul A. Bové, Love's Shadow

“Rembrandt's soiled angelic feet wittily recall the importance of humility, of the values inherent in the hesitant truths of comedy, which disassemble the official positions and advance needed alternatives. Those soiled souls let us laugh at some of the all-knowing stories catastrophists and the all-knowing innocents tell from the confidence of their own echo chambers. Those soiled feet give us to see how the built-up tales of apocalyptic cultural collapse deserve the smile of those who knew bettter all along.”
― Paul A. Bové, Love’s Shadow