'Terror is the piety of the Revolution' is one of the most difficult texts in the Garden Temple - deliberately so [...] Obviously, the 'terror' theme stands along with the military themes as being against the assumptions of the present age. Equally obviously, it does not stand alone, but relates to other themes such as The Sublime, which was the great discovery of the 18th century; in one sense one could place the guillotine beside the Alps in a pantheon of Terror. My point is: not all that glitters is gold and not all that appears liberal is spiritual or proceeds from moral conviction, or conviction of any kind [...] The universe of the modern liberal is a fiction (because it includes all the elements of 'the given' which he does not like to think about); but the point is that it is also an impoverished fiction because it excludes the tragic, the sublime, and (in the end) the serious; it is not even 'nice' (since even nice-ness, as we know, is suspect to modern cynicism).
Ian Hamilton Finlay