The category of the sacred — that which is not reducible to use, to explanation, to exchange — has always had a close relationship to the category of the aesthetic, which is also not fully reducible to utility or analysis. What the sacred requires and what the beautiful demands are different versions of the same thing: full presence, full attention, the temporary suspension of the self that merely wants. To make work in contact with this understanding is to risk everything that protective irony provides, and to discover what becomes possible without it.
Mura