Beauty is where God and the devil join battle
Beauty is a terrifying thing! It’s so frightening because it’s indefinable and it’s indefinable because God has surrounded us with nothing but riddles. Here the shores of a river meet, incompatibilities coexist. I am not an educated man, brother, but I have been thinking about this a great deal. There are so many mysteries; so many riddles that weigh man down to the ground. He is expected to solve them somehow or other and to climb dry out of the water. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? What I really can’t bear, though, is that a man with a noble heart and a superior intelligence may start out with the Madonna as his ideal and end up with Sodom as his ideal. It is even worse for one already striving for his Sodom ideal, who has not renounced his Madonna ideal, which still sets his heart ablaze, as it did when he was young and innocent. Yes, sir, a man’s range of feelings is wide, too wide even, and if I had my way, I’d narrow it quite a bit. It’s a hell of a situation, you know: what the head brands as shameful may appear as sheer beauty to the heart. But can there be beauty in Sodom? Yes and, believe me, it is precisely there that beauty lies for most men. Weren’t you aware of that secret