. . . and what is the insight of insights at the heart of plot? An open
secret, understood (through a glass darkly) by every real artist: that the
universe was created TO THE END that it be reflected in a beautiful,
capacious, accurate mirror (the great novel, the art work). This is the
providential given (and maybe the intuition that leads to so many futile
arguments between science and poetry). This is the realism of the
classic, the paradigmatic: art as a force of nature. A Proustian idea,
though Proust didn't end there. The concept keeps wheeling around, from
root to flower & back again. As he says (in a passage on a cathedral
destroyed in WW I) the life is not in the stone buildings, but in the
spirit of the people who built them. . .
Henry
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