"Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means "of the earth"—but earth's bowels, not its surface. Jane Harrison uses the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force..., the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form."
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Educators from the United StatesFree speech activistsWomen academics from the United StatesFeminists from the United StatesJournalists from New York (state)
Original Language: English
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p. 6
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia
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Camille Paglia
art historian, writer, literary critic
1947 · United States
338 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Camille Paglia →
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