“The road to Heaven-on-earth passes through Hell and never re-emerges. This is the great lesson of the 20th century. All Utopian thought is deeply flawed, rooted in the Arcadian prepossession of the Western imagination, always sailing to Cythera and breaking up on the shoals. But the issue is even larger than this. The human mind is shadowed by mortality and wishes only to escape its condition, sometimes through the medium of love, sometimes through the promise of faith, most often through one or another form of forgetfulness–drugs, entertainment, even war. We kill because we have to die.”
David Solway, interview, FrontPageMagazine.com, May 9, 2007 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
An ArtsJournal Blog