The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition by Cora Lenore Williams
page 13 of 18 (72%)
page 13 of 18 (72%)
|
element felt by the many. Your concern is not as formerly to recollect,
but to symbolize. To this end you study frieze and statuary and frequent lectures. Your sense of social solidarity grows through mutual comprehension of the same truths. And again that 'vexing, forward reaching sense of some more noble permanence' urges you on. 'Time was;' you joyously affirm for man to come to the knowledge of an eternal self. But that, your tradition and education have led you to believe, is still yonder, worlds away. And you image the soul in its quest passing from life to life as you are now passing from building to building, from hall to hall. But glad the thought - there will be courts wherein you may perhaps glimpse the plan of the whole and so gather strength and purpose for another housing. All at once you know that death has no fear for you and you feel toward your present life as you do toward these Palaces of the Mundane - the sooner compassed the better. You pass from court to edifice and from edifice to court, marveling at the symmetry of plan and structure. Unity, balance, and harmony become manifest as spatial properties - you had been taught to regard them as principles of art. You wonder if art itself may not be merely a matter of right placing - the adjustment of a thing to its environment. You are certain that this is so as each coign and niche offers you its particular insight. Strange vagaries float through your mind - one's duty to the inanimate things of one's possession; the house too large for the personality of the owner; the right setting for certain idiosyncrasies; character building as a constructive process; the ideal as the limit of an infinite series - each pointing the way, as you think, to a different vista of human outlook. What then your glad surprise to find these converging toward one ideal synthesis. In |
|