Life baffles and seems almost to mock. It refuses long to remain consistently one thing or another and it seldom puts us into one ...mood without violating it soon after. But Art, seeming to have for human dignity a respect which Life consistently lacks, grants us at least our right to sorrow fully and freely when sorrow is called for or to laugh our laugh out when laughter is appropriate. The artist selects and classifies what nature mingles in a hideous confusion and in doing so he is, in one of his many ways, adapting the universe to our minds by presenting it in an order which our emotions can follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If tragedy is made effective by provoking the phenomenon which psychology calls "empathy"Mby causing us, that is to say, actually ...to participate in the feelings of another--pure comedy must achieve its effects by completely inhibiting that phenomenon and by establishing a sense of separateness from the creatures whose antics we observe. Such sympathy as we feel for them is lofty and patronizing, like our sympathy for a child whose sorrows we know to be (however intense for him) transitory and trivial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vast majority of individual termites, belonging to the most highly evolved species, never leave their crowded fortress city, c...ould not see anything if they did, spend their entire existence in the narrow chambers and narrower tunnels of a labyrinth where they were born and where they breathe perpetually the damp, carbon dioxide atmosphere and dread more than anything else being compelled to leave it, even for an instant. The lives of certain human city dwellers who spend their days in air-conditioned offices, pass from them through tunnels of the subway to narrow chambers in some housing development, may seem remotely analogous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »