John

“It lives as pictures only can : by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky...”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“It is the exceptional novelist today who would say of himself, as Henry James did, that he ‘loved the story as story’, by which James meant the story apart from any overt ideational intention it might have, simply as, like any primitive tale, it brings into play what he called ‘the blessed faculty of wonder’. Already in James’s day, narration as a means by which the reader was held spellbound, as the old phrase put it, had come under suspicion. And the dubiety grew to the point where Walter Benjamin could say some three decades ago that the art of story-telling was moribund. T. S. Eliot’s famous earlier statement, that the novel had reached its end with Flaubert and James, would seem to be not literally true; the novel does seem to persist in some sort of life. But we cannot fail to see how uneasy it is with the narrative mode, which once made its vital principle, and how its practitioners seek by one device or another to evade or obscure or palliate the act of telling.”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“At the present moment, art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. That segment of our culture which is at all responsive to contemporary art is wholly permeable by it. The situation no longer obtains in which the experience of a contemporary work begins in resistance and proceeds by relatively slow stages to a comprehending or submissive admiration. The artist now can make scarcely anything which will prove really exigent to the audience, which will outrage its habitual sensibility. The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased—the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art.”
― Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity