Thank you. I'm going to read it and reply when time allows. Here's something I keep remembering. It's Rilke, "Torso of an Archaic Apollo."
Never will we know his fabulous head where the eyes' apples slowly ripened. Yet his torso glows: a candelabrum set before his gaze which is pushed back and hid, restrained and shining. Else the curving breast could not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn of the loins could this smile easily have passed into the bright groins where the genitals burned. Else stood this stone a fragment and defaced, with lucent body from the shoulders falling, too short, not gleaming like a lion's fell; nor would this star have shaken the shackles off, bursting with light, until there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. The other absolute classic on the importance of art is Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man." Thanks again, Joanna ----- Original Message ----- h/t threequarksdaily.com Yes, I know that this does not belong on pen-l; but economists may want to consider what the University will be like once the Humanities are eviscerated. http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/elaine_scarry_poetry_literature_reading_empathy_ethics.php Poetry Changed the World Injury and the Ethics of Reading Elaine Scarry By “empathy” Hunt and Pinker—rightly in my view—mean not the capacity of literature to make us feel compassion for a fictional being (though literature certainly does this), but rather the capacity of literature to exercise and reinforce our recognition that there are other points of view in the world, and to make this recognition a powerful mental habit. If this recognition occurs in a large enough population, then a law against injuring others can be passed, after which the prohibition it expresses becomes freestanding and independent of sensibility. 6 Literature says: “Imagine Pamela, and her right to be free of injury will become self-evident to you.” The laws say: “We are not interested in your imaginative abilities or disabilities; whether or not you can imagine Pamela, you are prohibited from injuring her.” *** beauty interrupts and gives us sudden relief from our own minds. Iris Murdoch says we undergo “an unselfing” in the presence of a beautiful thing; “self-preoccupation” and worries on one’s own behalf abruptly fall away. Simone Weil refers to this phenomenon as a “radical decentering.” I call it an “opiated adjacency,” an awkward term but one which reminds us that there are many things in life that make us feel acute pleasure (opiated) and many things in life that make us feel sidelined, but there is almost nothing—except beauty—that does the two simultaneously. Feeling acute pleasure at finding oneself on the margins is a first step in working toward fairness. 31 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
