Tryptic Surmises - Ekphrastics For William Hawkins & Caravaggio, Both Painting Horses Comments

'... that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence. I will put forward the argument that the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this 'real presence'... the seeming paradox of its] 'necessary possibility'... when we come face to face with a text and work of art or music which is to say when we encounter the 'other' in its condition of freedom, [it] is a wager on transcendence... a wager on God.' — George Steiner, from Real Presences p.3


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