as fine-toned as the images she describes, that the aestheticizing impulse this represents--Claude Glasses were standard equipment for gentlemen on the "Grand Tour"--is still with us. But doesn't she also suggest that the necessary falsifications of artistic representation that make the world beautiful overlap with the everyday constructions of human perception that make it bearable? Art protects us from a Nature whose "ideas", unmediated by any kind of painterly or poetic framing rhetoric, would be too vast for even the highest human thinking: "through a glass darkly", in fact.
Claude Glass
To Robert and Pamela Woof
from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: Claude Glass
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