Rainer J. Hanshe

“But then, even our cataclysms, even the atrocities we have endured, witnessed, & meticulously documented, however strong the force of our ethics, none of them will remain. The species will perish, the planet will perish; both will become nothing but specks of dust drifting through the cosmos, just as the specks of dust now drifting about us are perchance the indecipherable remnants of other measurably distant earlier eons, the ashes of . . . a prelude, the ashes of those who have been burned.”
― Rainer J. Hanshe, Shattering the Muses

“Writing, as most art, is considered to be essentially superfluous. Who is an artist before a surgeon? Or a scientist? But the fact that tyrants and political forces of every age have been threatened by art again and again, condemned it as degenerate or poisonous, and have silenced, brutalized, or murdered artists because of their work only serves to illustrate how significant art is, that it is our one greatest power. I would even go so far as to say that the tyrant ‘understands’ art more than the devotee, for the latter is generally too ‘pious’ and adoring, almost like a simple-minded believer overwrought by faith who simply loves and finds everything ‘great,’ whereas the former suffers the transformative threat of art more, is even endangered by it, hence their terror.”
― Rainer J. Hanshe