War & Peace Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia frames beauty less as decoration than as a hostile technology: a human-made countermeasure against the unruly, indifferent churn of the natural world. Calling it "our weapon" yanks aesthetics out of the museum and drops it into a battlefield where culture fights for dominance. The verb choice matters. We do not simply perceive beauty; we "make objects" by imposing "limit, symmetry, proportion" - the classic toolkit of Western form. Beauty becomes an act of editing: carving the continuous into the discrete, turning flux into something the mind can hold, own, and display.

The subtext is Paglia's signature war between nature and culture, with nature coded as overwhelming, erotic, and destabilizing, and culture as a brittle but necessary architecture of control. "Halts and freezes" is bluntly anti-Romantic; it rejects the idea that merging with nature is liberation. Instead, Paglia suggests that surrender to flux is annihilation. Form is survival.

Contextually, this sits in her long-running argument (especially in Sexual Personae) that Western art is an Apollonian defense against Dionysian forces: sex, mortality, chaos. Read through a late-20th-century culture-war lens, it also needles the pieties of "natural" as automatically good. If nature is sacred, then beauty is profane - and intentionally so. Paglia's real gambit is to make control sound honest, even brave: beauty as the civilized lie we choose because the alternative is the melt.