2007

he author of a work of imagination is trying to effect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of any thing we read.
The fact that what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but that it affects directly, though only amongst many other influences , the whole of what we are, is best elicited , I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of our individual literary education. Consider the adolescent reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, or invasion of the undeveloped personality, the empty (swept and garnished) room, by the stronger personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at a later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author takes complete possession of us for a time; then another, and finally they begin to affect each other in our mind. We weigh one against another; we see that each has qualities absent from others, and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others: we begin to be, in fact, critical: and it is our growing critical power which protects us from excessive possession by anyone literary personality. The good critic- and we should all try to critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers- is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminating. Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, and the accumulation of knowledge or what sometimes is meant by the term ‘a well-stocked mind.’ It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to our self.

(word count: 445 The longest passage I have come across yet!)

Precis:

Title: The Way Literature Affects A Mind

The literary writers affect us somehow, intentionally or unintentionally; just like the food does while its in one's stomach, regardless of its taste.The affects of reading can be understood well by analysing our past reading experience, where a young literary reader gets inspired by one or more poets, not only because of his literary sensibility, but also the poet's strong personality occupying his empty mind easily; and the same thing happens with elderly people with little or no prior reading experience. One after another, authors affect us, and finally critical evaluation of different authors starts taking place in our mind and this is the end of perceived literary ideals. A good critic has an increasingly wide ability to evaluate. Wide-reading is not a 'treasure of stocked knowledge' but a tool to perceive and assort different literary works based upon our views about life.
(word count: 150)
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2009

From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life.” Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought. “Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. “Not only in infection,” he says, “a sign of art , but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.” But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience – the experience of contemplation- is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as “ emotion recollected in tranquility’. But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are “ here”- alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and functions of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. “ The purpose of playing,” as Hamlet explains, “ both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” But the image of the passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion doest not infected us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III or with the jealously of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare’s theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is in complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.
(word count: 425)

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Title: The Great Philosophers' and Artists' Views on Art

Great philosophers like Tolstoi and Plato have allegedly remarked art as a source of moral imbalance, where Plato has regarded poetry as a gateway to the flow of negative emotions and Tolstoi has called art an infection. But there is flaw in these theories as morality and aesthetic experiences are two different aspects. Emotions are from within in our selves and we are aware of their strength, though Wordsworth regards poetry as emotions flown in tranquility. Shakespeare has explained art as a reflection of nature and passions which do not harm us, we only experience their nature, just as we read and not imitate the characters of Macbeth,Richard III, Othello; hence, Shakespeare theory on art is in complete agreement with that of other great artists.
(word count:125)
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2001

It was not from want of perceiving the beauty of external nature but from the different way of perceiving it, that the early Greeks did not turn their genius to portray, either in colour or in poetry, the outlines, the hues, and contrasts of all fair valley, and hold cliffs, and golden moons, and rosy lawns which their beautiful country affords in lavish abundance.

Primitive people never so far as I know, enjoy when is called the picturesque in nature, wild forests, beetling cliffs, reaches of Alpine snow are with them great hindrances to human intercourse, and difficulties in the way of agriculture. They are furthermore the homes of the enemies of mankind, of the eagle, the wolf, or the tiger, and are most dangerous in times of earthquake or tempest. Hence the grand and striking features of nature are at first looked upon with fear and dislike.

I do not suppose that Greeks different in the respect from other people, except that the frequent occurrence of mountains and forests made agriculture peculiarly difficult and intercourse scanty, thus increasing their dislike for the apparently reckless waste in nature. We have even in Homer a similar feeling as regards the sea, --- the sea that proved the source of all their wealth and the condition of most of their greatness. Before they had learned all this, they called it “the unvintagable sea” and looked upon its shore as merely so much waste land. We can, therefore, easily understand, how in the first beginning of Greek art, the representation of wild landscape would find no place, whereas, fruitful fields did not suggest themselves as more than the ordinary background. Art in those days was struggling with material nature to which it felt a certain antagonism.

There was nothing in the social circumstances of the Greeks to produce any revolution in this attitude during their greatest days. The Greek republics were small towns where the pressure of the city life was not felt. But as soon as the days of the Greeks republics were over, the men began to congregate for imperial purposes into Antioch, or Alexandria, or lastly into Rome, than we seek the effect of noise and dust and smoke and turmoil breaking out into the natural longing for rural rest and retirement so that from Alexander’s day …… We find all kinds of authors --- epic poets, lyricist, novelists and preachers --- agreeing in the precise of nature, its rich colours, and its varied sounds.
(word count: 415)


Title: The Early Greek Realisation Of Natural Beauty

The marvelous scenery of nature had not been enjoyed by the primitive Greeks, as to them, it was a hindrance in their way to cultivation and progress and brought problems during natural disasters. The similar air of dislike is found in Homer about sea, where its shore is seen as a waste land though it later proved to be wrong, and hence, nature had no place in early Greek art. Nothing brought change in this mind set, until when Greeks started mobilising from the countryside to the urban areas like Antioch, Alexandria and Rome for their material purposes; and experienced dust, noise and smoke. This made them long for the peace found in rural area and therefore, the Greek art started agreeing with the importance of natural beauty and its various tones.
(word count: 130)
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2002

The official name of our species is homo sapiens; but there are many anthropologists who prefer to think of man as homo Faber-the smith, the maker of tools. It would be possible, I think, to reconcile these two definitions in a third. If man is a knower and an efficient doer, it is only because he is also a talker. In order to be Faber and Sapiens, Homo must first be loquax, the loquacious one. Without language we should merely be hairless chimpanzees. Indeed we should be some thing much worse. Possessed of a high IQ but no language, we should be like the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels- Creatures too clever to be guided by instinct, too Self-centered to live in a state of animal grace, and therefore condemned forever, frustrated and malignant, between contented ape hood and aspiring ‘humanity. It was language that made possible the accumulation of knowledge and the broadcasting of information. It was language that permitted the expression of religious insight, the formulation of ethical ideals, the codification to laws, It was language, in a word, that turned us into human beings and gave birth to civilization.
(word count: 191)

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Title: Homo Loquax, the true definition of the man


Homo sapiens and homo Faber, the definitions of man should be redesigned to homo loquax, the talker; as it would be impossible to be knower and doer without being a talker. Man would be a bizarre creature without language, with a strange mixture of IQ and personality traits, and arrogance and frustration of a higher order animal. Language gave way to human progress in every field of human civilization.

(word count: 69)