This Explains a Lot of Things, Actually

“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird” (Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to …

An Artistic Clerisy

“Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie—and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the twentieth century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of a clerisy, …

Regimented, In Other Words

“In 1 Corinthians 14:40, Paul requires, among other things, that everything be done according to taxis, according to order. He is not just discouraging chandalier-swinging, he is requiring something else, of a different kind, in its place. The word means ‘arrangement; order; a fixed succession observing also a fixed time; orderly array [in a military …