THE POWER OF LOVE

'When we talk about the problem of the art of monstrous men, we are really talking about a larger problem - the problem of human love. The question "what do we do with the art?" is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful? The problem is that you still love her. How often this describes our relationships with our families, our spouses, sometimes even our children. It's the problem and it's the solution, this durable nature of love, the way it withstands all the shit we throw at it, the bad behaviour, the disappointments, the antrums, the betrayals.

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Families are hard because they are the monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They're unchosen monsters. How random it all seems, when you really consider it. And yet somehow we mostly end up loving our families anyway.

When I was young, I believed in the perfectibility of humans. I believed that the people I loved should be perfect and I should be perfect too. That's not quite how love works.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.256.

ART IS A CONVERSATION

'...consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art. I repeat: this occurs in every case.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.251.

BEAUTY UNITES

'...beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.'

Dave Hickey in Claire Dederer in Monsters, p.244.

BEAUTY HAPPENS

'We don't make decisions about beauty. Beauty happens to us.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.244.

ORGINAL SIN EXPRESSED TODAY

'Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that on some level, I'm not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. In everyday deed and thought, I'm a decent-enough human. But I'm something else as well, something more objectionable. The Victorians understood this feeling; its why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suuppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us - in me - chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in my self, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People?, p.38.

GOD LEADS THE WAY IN SELF-SACRIFICE

'...the way of renunciation is not alien to God. In Jesus, God has been there ahead of us...'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.123.

FROM CHURCH CHOIRS TO WORLD WARS

'The historian Herbert Butterfield is supposed to have said that if we take the animosity present in an average church choir and give that animosity a history by extending it over time, we will have an adequate explanation of all the wars ever fought in human history.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.64.

SIN IS INGRATITUDE

'Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude.'
Karl Barth in Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.56

WHAT SEXUAL ETHICS ARE ALL ABOUT

'...a "crisis" in sexual ethics is never simply that; it is a crisis in our understanding of what it means to be a person. Are we beings characterized most of all by will and choice, beings who confer meaning and value on our acts by our choices? Or are we beings who discover meaning and value in the embodied life God has created? Because the latter is the truth, the church can offer to the world something more hopeful than the idea that what is good depends largely on our own choosing.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Life, p.21.

WHAT CHILDREN SENSE

'Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocriosy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.'

Mavis Gallant, 'The Doctor' in The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories, p.173.