Pavlo’s Reviews > All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess > Status Update

“…there need be no rivalry between beauty and goodness if an artwork is good when and because it is beautiful. If art succeeds artistically insofar as it is populated by complex characters, and it succeeds ethically insofar as it resists the lure of caricature, then aesthetic success is moral success.”

“Perhaps to Perry and Emba, who do not seem to put much stock in pleasure, a lifetime of renunciation does not sound so grueling. But it occurs to me, who prefers to eat when I am hungry, to ask: Why not effect the sort of political change that would in turn improve our tastes, thereby rendering self-regulation needless? In other words, why not fight for the possibility of ethical pleasure?”

„David French does [Emba] the favor of clarifying in an approving missive about her book in his Atlantic newsletter. “Sex without love is a danger to human hearts,” he cautions—as if sex with love, or love itself, posed no danger.”

"...It is no mystery that he continues to trade in sensibility and evocation—a whiff of woodsmoke here, a flash of picket fencing there—and not in details about policy, which can be dismissed as the petty province of small-minded technocrats. What is rigor but a liberal affectation, a needle pricking at the exalted balloon of Big Ideas?”

"Deneen, whose book appeared on Obama’s annual reading list in 2018, is canny enough to understand that he cannot follow his premises to their authoritarian conclusions without ceding all claim to legitimacy. It is no mystery that he continues to trade in sensibility and evocation—a whiff of woodsmoke here, a flash of picket fencing there—and not in details about policy..."

“[Deneen] is representative in his resistance to tracing the concrete contours of the world he would prefer to the supposed disenchantments of liberalism,perhaps because clarity would invite critique (or ridicule). It is all well and good to bluster about the beauty of marriage, but in practice, the only way to ensure that people who do not want to get married do so despite their antipathy is to mandate the practice"

“The thirteenth-century canoness Juliana of Cornillon told nurses and family members who entreated her to eat that she was saving herself for “better and more beautiful food.” Aren’t we all? But until we ascend to the celestial restaurant, I recommend bingeing to bursting. If it is never enough, try to love that about it. Try to savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger.”

“[Susan Sontag] is vehement that Persona is not an erotic movie, about which I think she could not be more mistaken. What does eroticism consist in if not the impossible urge to smash through the skin and reach all the way to the beloved’s bloody core?”