Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo

"...the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness... To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo... Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is."
 

—John Dewey, "Art as Experience" [1934] Penguin Perigee 2005, p17.