Sublime

Norton quoted too from Emerson and his essay “On Beauty,” but more than Emerson and other Americans, Norton had been influenced by two Englishmen, the philosopher John Stuart Mill and the art critic John Ruskin. Mill’s claim that the study of art was on par with an intellectual and moral education had been part of Norton’s argument to Harvard when

Art is two parts agency and one part inner heat. The artist loves going down rabbit holes, working toward and against something at the same time, translating sensory and extrasensory impressions that all have their own sovereignty or joy, each of them on a journey to bring something back from a personal underworld, to build a new body out of

atavistic

So the corpse of the present is being preserved as a record.

One is reminded of the mediaeval argument for the immortality of the soul: since the soul is not composed of parts, it cannot be separated into parts and thus cannot undergo dissolution.

fragmentation of the social sense-making and collective action capacity