Home > Author > Michael Shindler
1 " Secular life, like an unfertilized egg, is ever-pregnant with a strange hollowness. "
― Michael Shindler
2 " 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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " 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. "
