“Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both. God, who had summoned light and darkness into being by the power of his voice, and separated the seas from the land, had ordained as well that the whole of his creation be a monument to harmony. ‘It is upon distinctions of number that the underlying principles of everything depend.’ So Abelard had written. A century on from his death, monuments to the cosmic order created by God, to its fusion of the miraculous and the geometric, were starting to rise above towns across Christendom. To enter Saint-Denis, where Abelard had first lived as a monk, was to behold an abbey utterly transformed. The rays of the sun, filtered through windows patterned with exquisitely coloured glass, illuminated the interior with an unprecedented light, radiant as, at the end of days, the descent of the new Jerusalem from heaven would be radiant, with the brilliance ‘like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as silver’. Yet if Saint-Denis, in the play of coloured rays across its interior, offered its visitors a glimpse of revelation, so also, in the soaring of its flying buttresses, in the elongation of its vaulted arches, did it proclaim its architect’s mastery of proportion and geometry. Dedicated in 1144, in the presence of the French king himself, the abbey had provided a model for a spectacular new style of cathedral. ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’ So it was written on the doors of Saint-Denis. The cathedrals built in the abbey’s wake provided a physical expression, on a scale never before attempted, of the distinctive order that had merged in the Latin West. Modernitas, its enthusiasts called it: the final age of time. They were spokesman for revolution: a revolution that had triumphed.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion – which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea – you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.”

Lemony Snicket The Vile Village

“The artist behind a new, much debated portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales, probably knew she was wading into touchy territory when she took up a commission to paint one of the most closely watched people on the planet. In an interview with Tatler magazine, which commissioned the portrait for its July cover, artist Hannah Uzor… Her portraits aim to capture ‘the soul of the person,’ Uzor said. But for many, the portrait resulting from that close study depicted neither the princess’s soul, nor even her physical characteristics. In response to the painting — showing a calm-looking figure in a fluid white gown against a buoyant blue backdrop — several commenters asked, ‘Who is this?’ ‘The painting is beautiful but does not look like the princess,’ one noted. Others were more direct in their criticism, calling the piece ‘an insult’ and ‘terrible.’… Uzor’s portrait comes just days after a portrait of King Charles III drew its own round of criticism. It also recalls public fury at Amy Sherald’s Michelle Obama portrait in 2018, which viewers similarly argued did not look like her. But with so much public critique centered on resemblance, it’s worth asking if likeness is the right metric for evaluating portraiture. When we have seemingly endless photographic representations of people such as the princess, some say portraits can — and even should — have wider aspirations. ‘Portraiture can be representational or abstract. There are no boundaries or limits,’ Bree Pickering, the director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, said in an email. ‘Likeness is often something that audiences look for, but as we’ve seen recently, it can be the conversation that happens around the artwork that tells us the most about the times we live in.’ Pickering also notes that ‘portraiture shares a story from an artist’s point of view,’ meaning that it tells viewers about the subject — but can also reveal the ‘broader social context in which it was created.’ Lisa Mansfield, an art historian who studies portraiture at the University of Adelaide, draws a parallel between Uzor’s portrait and Paul Emsley’s official portrait of the then-Duchess of Cambridge, ‘which was unveiled in 2013 to a disparaging chorus of disapproval.’ Such clashes between ‘artistic intention and audience perception reveal the disconnect between what a portrait is and what the world at large thinks a portrait of a princess should look like,’ Mansfield wrote in an email, adding that in an age of social media and selfies, it’s ‘easy to overlook that a portrait is fundamentally a work of artful fiction’ and ‘not a facsimile of the face or body.’ Contemporary artists have long taken creative liberties in depicting leaders….Cherine Fahd, an artist and professor of visual communication at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote in an email that when looking at the Princess Kate portrait, questions like ‘Does the portrait provoke dialogue?’ and ‘Does it reflect or challenge societal contexts?’ are ‘better than “Does it look her?”‘”

Washington Post May 23, 2024

“Figuratively, at least, people do die of oversedation; fumbling about fearfully, blindly, they grasp the sweet-smelling potions handed them with never a look at the label, and suddenly they are dead. They died ‘natural’ deaths, then.”

Jim Thompson in Edward Gorman, ed., The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction

“Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering – such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city – had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’ This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes. In other ways, though, the author had indeed pushed originality to an extreme. So shocking was his book that it was published without any hint of his name. The New Justine was not a work of history at all, but of fiction. Its observations on the character of ancient civilizations formed merely one strand in a vast tapestry, woven to demonstrate a disorienting proposition: that ‘virtue is not a world of priceless worth, it is just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently is nothing real about it’. To think otherwise was imbecility.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [The author in question is the Marquis de Sade, who Holland takes very seriously as a philosopher and not in a good way.]

“in general it may be observed that I was very seldom idle...”

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe

“Men of law had least pardon – believe nothing else!…”

Indirect speech by Truth, I think, in William Langland, William. Piers Plowman. An Alliterative Verse Translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, edited, introduced and annotated by Elizabeth D. Kirk and Judith H. Anderson.

“Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. And the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post-Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable – that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements: that ‘the public’ does not understand these things; that ‘the likes of us’ cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Mystagogue” in A Miscellany of Men, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)