No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There... they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel ... will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but p...lace now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent ...by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's--as opposed to the painter's--mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Por...tland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki's was the one he was waiting... for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, ...not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning..., theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhamm...adanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is the use of "good" painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, b...ut when we do, we become as still as a picture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »