Topical Guide 462
Mark Dorset
Aesthetics
Allusion; Quotation
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 3:
“I’ve been thinking that I have to fix the place up when they finally get rid of the smell. I thought I had to bring it back to the condition it was in when I moved in. Make it brand new again. But now that I look around here, I see I don’t have to do that at all.”
“Ah-ha!” says Harold. “Here you have an entirely new aesthetic.”
“Exactly.”
“L’esthétique du mal,” says Belinda.
“Very good,” says Harold. “And if you embrace this esthétique du mal, it will save you a great deal of trouble and expense.”
ON SATURDAY, I WAS EATING SOME CHICKEN HERE, AT THIS SPOT, AND IT WAS PRETTY GOOD, BUT I GOT A BITTER TASTE IN MY MOUTH AND IT SPOILED EVERYTHING. THIS IS HOW IT IS.
Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal”:
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. […]
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute. […]
Life is a bitter aspic. We are not
At the center of a diamond. […]
He disposes the world in categories, thus:
The peopled and the unpeopled. In both, he is
Alone. But in the peopled world, there is,
Besides the people, his knowledge of them. In
The unpeopled, there is his knowledge of himself.
Which is more desperate in the moments when
The will demands that what he thinks be true? […]
[These excerpts are a tiny fraction of the whole, which you can find here, as it originally appeared in The Kenyon Review in 1944.]
Laurence Sterne, The Journal to Eliza:
Ap.16 [1767] 5 in the afternoon—I have just been eating my Chicking, sitting over my repast upon it, with Tears—a bitter Sause—Eliza! but I could eat it with no other—when Molly spread the Table Cloath, my heart fainted within me—one solitary plate—one knife—one fork—one Glass!—O Eliza! ’twas painfully distressing,—I gave a thousand pensive penetrating Looks at the Arm chair thou so often graced on these quiet, sentimental Repasts—& sighed & laid down my knife & fork,—& took out my handkerchief, clap’d it across my face & wept like a child […]
See also:
Aesthetics: Aesthetic Choices TG 49; Aesthetics; Style TG 82, TG 461
Allusion; Quotation TG 140; TG 455
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