Thursday, November 16, 2006

should this be considered a miracle?

please read the post i wrote earlier today around 10:00 a.m. then, read the post i'm writing now...
I wrote the previous post at 10:00ish am this morning, i had Aesthetics class at 3:15. What did we talk about? John Dewey's Art as Experience What passage did we read from it? Page 18, which states:

Most mortals are conscoius that a split often occurs between their present living and their past and future. Then the past hangs upon them like a burden; it invades the present with a sense of regret, of oppurtunities not used, and of consequences we wish undone. It rests upon the present as an oppression, instead of being a storehouse of resources by which to move confidently forward. But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead of trying ro live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past, it uses past successes to inform the present. Every living experience owes its richness to what Sanatyana well calls, "hushed reverberations." (footnote to this: "These familiar flowers, these well rememberd brid notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed, grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedge, such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today might be no more than the faint preception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and grass of far-off years, which still live in us and transform our preception into love- George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss.) "To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possesion of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often, we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present because we suboridnate that which is absent. Because of the frequency of the abandonment of the present to the past and future, the happy periods of an experience that is now complete because it absorbs into itself memories of the past and anticipations of the future, come to onstitute an esthetic ideal. Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is."

No comments: