A Man May Have Spent His Life

Our Vanity, Our Passions, Our Spirit Of Imitation, Our Abstract Intelligence, Our Habits Have Long Been At Work, And It Is The Task Of Art To Undo This Work Of Theirs, Making Us Travel Back In The Direction From Which We Have Come To The Depths Where What Has Really Existed Lies Unknown Within Us.

Thanks To Art, Instead Of Seeing One World, Our Own, We See It Multiplied And As Many Original Artists As There Are, So Many Worlds Are At Our Disposal.

We Feel In One World, We Think And Name In Another. Between The Two We Can Set Up A System Of References, But We Cannot Fill In The Gap.

It Seems That Certain Transcendental Realities Emit Rays To Which The Masses Are Sensitive. That Is How, For Example, When An Event Takes Place, When At The Front An Army Is In Danger, Or Defeated, Or Victorious, The Rather Obscure News Which The Cultivated Man Does Not Quite Understand, Excite In The Masses An Emotion Which Surprises Him And In Which, Once The Experts Have Informed Him Of The Actual Military Situation, He Recognizes The Populace's Perception Of That "aura" Surrounding Great Events And Visible For Hundreds Of Kilometers.

Just As Those Who Practice The Same Profession Recognize Each Other Instinctively, So Do Those Who Practice The Same Vice.