A strong, catholic response to works of art is like a comfortable account in a Swiss bank. One can never become emotionally bankrupt. Given tolerable health (for a response to works of art is partly physical), there is always plenty to live for, because one will never come to the end of the things one wants to see, or read all the poetry one wants to read; and if one did, one could go back again to the beginning, go back to the Arena Chapel after ten years, go back to the Velasquez Room at the Prado, re-read Lycidas or Antony and Cleopatra.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Plenty to Live For
Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (London: John Murray, 1974; rpt. 1976), p. 45: