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into the marshes of corruption, as misery, as curse; beauty as the worldly destroyer of the soul. Against the Hellenic worship of beauty as the visible embodiment of goodness and truth, the Hebraic fear of the graven image (was not the Golden Calf beautiful?). The destruction of the icons in Byzantium in the eighth century and of Catholic images by Protestants in the violent sixteenth - to say nothing of the long suspicion of the effects of certain forms of poetry on the audience, going back to Plato and resecured in each generation by puritanical sects of Chris-tianity, Judaism, Islam, in love with a certain moral and spiritual beauty but fearful of, even hating, the beauty of the body - were examples of an underlying tension in our own relation to beauty: is it revelation or distraction, angelic 
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annunciation or Pascalian divertissement, saintly testament or demonic assertion, path or trap? And if beauty can be used by both good and evil, truth and deception, what are the ways to distinguish them? How dare we try to read these signs that have the power to destroy their interpreter? 7. The Ice in the Mouth of Venus After a time of confusion and darkness, when we feel deprived of truth from those from whom we most expect it, there sometimes comes a moment of relief, cleansing and sometimes burning, when someone tells us a truth both hard and brutal - some fact we are forced to acknowledge that does not flatter or please us -  |
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