In earnest, liberal, quite Victorian tones I have seen art as fusion of ethics and esthetics. This is to be most oldfashioned, passé, in these, hmm, more dynamic times with all things being in our coldly certain flux, perpetually indetermined and under doubt. Not that they weren't for earnest liberal Victorians. Maybe unjustly, George Eliot comes to mind here: to me she is the epitome of the high liberal worry as regards the cold ways of the godless world. Yes, things certainly were in flux also for them - but in a different way, the structure of doubt itself had not been undermined by any grand and fashionable French theory. Doubt meant the ultimate integrity - as it still does for me.
So, I do see literature, poetry especially, as the most serious form of human thought even when including the theory of natural science or ancient and modern philosophy, and even religion. Or, rather, I see art, literature, as the place where these majestic traditions and languages come together, fuse in the most meaningful way possible to humankind. Esthetics for us is the most direct route of expressing our otherhood, of being on this strange pilgrimage that we are being on. And so we continue wondering whether the fault is with the soul and its sovereigns or perhaps then with the lions. And if so, let us by all means send them back to Monsieur Dufy's Hamburg.
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