Justice is a painted gendarme whose colors rub off in our hands. A gendarme that’s been painted, carved, encrusted in the foods we ingest. The trademark of our moribund society, of a nation unhinged, of men who don’t know how to hold on to the elegance they possessed as children, when man — that obese monster — happily slept.
“What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. The artist says, ‘I will make that event happen again, altering its shape, which was disfigured by its contacts with other events, so that its true significance is revealed’; and his audience says, ‘We will let that event happen again by looking at this man’s picture or house, listening to his music or reading his book.’ It must not be copied, it must be remembered, it must be lived again, passed through those parts of the mind which are actively engaged in life, which bleed when they are wounded and give forth the bland emulsions of joy, while at the same time it is being examined by those parts of the mind which stand apart from life. At the end of this process the roots of experience are traced; the alchemy by which they make a flower of joy or pain is, so far as is possible to our brutishness, detected. What is understood is mastered. If art could investigate all experiences then man would understand the whole of life, and could control his destiny.”
Rebecca West | Black Lamb and Grey Falcon