Or: Phantasmagoria Meets Pandemonium
Part I: Phantasmagoria
Rebecca Goldstein on first encountering Plato —
| “I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)” |
| “We tell ourselves stories in order to live….We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” |
Part II: Pandemonium
Terry Teachout in Commentary on Oct. 1, 2014:
“When making art or writing about it, the aesthete
tries never to moralize. Nor will he look with favor
upon artists who do so, no matter whether their
particular brand of moralizing is religious or secular.
But he can and must be fully, intensely alive to the
moral force of art whose creators aspire merely to
make the world around us more beautiful, and in
so doing to pierce the veil of the visible and give us
a glimpse of the permanently true. That is his job:
to help make sense of the pandemonium amid which
we live.”
Rivka Galchen in The New York Times Sunday Book Review
issue of October 5, 2014 (online Sept. 30):
“The story describes honestly something that is,
which is very different from proposing what ought to be.”
See also Pandemonium in this journal.