Opera once was an important social instrument--especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together... and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers... quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith; it assumes the presence of humanity; world and self are generated from within; loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room. I alone infuse the silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the gree...d of gold and all unloveliness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with... pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »