The satisfaction derived from performing grand tumultuous scenes such as these, quickly infects an audience!
Novelists, poets and visual artists alike use these cinematic effects of zooming in and out of a given scene to great effect. Tolstoy sliced up entire centuries in which armies of soldiers, ant-like, march across continents with the carrion portions of dying empires and nations. George Eliot paints a picture of a village in rural England as might be seen from a nearby hilltop, before focusing in on the minutiae of domesticity trapped in the amber of her narrative genius. Each of the adventures of Asterix and Obelix is folded in leaves between a map pinpointing the location of a tiny village surrounded by the glare of the Roman power and, on the back page, we their admirers withdraw like watching spirits back into the wood while our heroic friends celebrate their feats of courage and cunning to one another in dancing and mirth and the campfire smoke rises high above to mingle with the pathless distances of stars.
Edgar's description of the view from the high and bending head of Dover Cliff is as fine an example of our human greatness being reduced to the insignificance of insects by the dizzying scope of our grappling minds.
Immediately after reading this article, W H Auden's poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts" came to mind:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
...and Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" of course.
The satisfaction derived from performing grand tumultuous scenes such as these, quickly infects an audience!
Novelists, poets and visual artists alike use these cinematic effects of zooming in and out of a given scene to great effect. Tolstoy sliced up entire centuries in which armies of soldiers, ant-like, march across continents with the carrion portions of dying empires and nations. George Eliot paints a picture of a village in rural England as might be seen from a nearby hilltop, before focusing in on the minutiae of domesticity trapped in the amber of her narrative genius. Each of the adventures of Asterix and Obelix is folded in leaves between a map pinpointing the location of a tiny village surrounded by the glare of the Roman power and, on the back page, we their admirers withdraw like watching spirits back into the wood while our heroic friends celebrate their feats of courage and cunning to one another in dancing and mirth and the campfire smoke rises high above to mingle with the pathless distances of stars.
Edgar's description of the view from the high and bending head of Dover Cliff is as fine an example of our human greatness being reduced to the insignificance of insects by the dizzying scope of our grappling minds.
Immediately after reading this article, W H Auden's poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts" came to mind:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
...and Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" of course.