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