Leaves from the Notebooks

I flip through a notebook from last year and, having half-forgotten the contexts in which I wrote a lot of quotes down, I find charming, fascinating, or perplexing aphorisms:

"In contrast to Nietzsche, the Dionysian impulse for Warburg is not opposed to a lack of artistry so much as to its hypertrophy--a self-conscious use of symbolic forms emphasizing the intervention of human artifice." (Hans Belting)

"Descriptions of aerial vistas in Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies (1930) draw on his accounts of abstract paintings he had seen the previous year at the Parisian Panorama de l'art contemporain." (George McCartney; part of the context for this quote and my reading the article it's from have to do with Paul Virilio's War and Cinema, specifically the chapter, "Cinema Isn't I See, It's I Fly.")