^quivering epicenter
P55 “cupping our hands to the sides of our faces to block out the two lesser works”
P50 “I saw the end of the world, the barbed edge of nothingness, and it was not something to fear, but to relish.”
P53 “I see myself and all humanity in the eyes of the holy donkey”
P58 “One must paint, he said, believing the Antichrist is traipsing through the next village.”
P129 “Who knows the inner workings of your soul better than I?”
^^critic‘s mind vs. heart. Linking Schmidt & Beckenbauer.
P26 “because of mediocrity‘s unrivaled capacity for annihilating beauty, it will always be victorious.”
P20 “Schmidt said he well understood why Caravaggio would appeal to someone like me, an incurious American toddler nursed on the teats of an illiterate culture.”
P115 “even though he called the United States an ‘exercise in the ludicrous‘ or ‘an obese infant with a head injury‘” 🤣
pickWhat is art criticism? Academic frenemies “chat about chaos, agony, and the end of the world.” A bit of Bolaño, satirizing academics, + Beckett, exhausting language. Repetition & variation. Style reinforces narrator‘s obsessiveness & makes you question his reliability. Same info over & over to show his limited focus? Outlandish subject of study: 16th century sex-addicted, syphilitic pig farmer painter. But someone must be the expert. 2022
“…words, borne of the mind, were slapdash and chaotic, words in fact took one only further from the soul, not closer, and the purpose of art, Schmidt and I believed, was to connect or reunite a person with their soul, to bring about a wordless communion with the infinite and thus our books, replete with endlessly fallible words, were merely attempts at approaching what painting had mastered by default, simply by excluding words.”
Saint Sebastian's Abyss | 
