skopia
Watching the French Revolution collapse into terror, Schiller concluded that reason cannot free people whose feelings stay uneducated. Beauty does it, through play, and Romanticism built its case for art on that claim.
Mizoguchi stammers, and the beauty of Kyoto's Golden Pavilion stands between him and every living thing. Mishima builds the 1950 arson by an acolyte into a case for destroying what you cannot possess.
Told by a charming aristocrat that beauty is everything, Dorian Gray wishes his portrait would age in his place, and it does. Wilde's epigrams carry every page, and the horror arrives beneath them.
Tanizaki, a Japanese novelist, argues in earnest that the beauty of his country was made for dim rooms and wrecked by electric light. Lacquer, gold leaf, and old toilets all make his case.
At a hot spring in Japan's snow country, a wealthy Tokyo idler keeps visiting a geisha who loves him past anything he can give. Kawabata states almost nothing and it lands anyway.
Beauty sits in no object, yet you expect everyone to agree with you. Kant grounds that strange demand, and shows why a raging ocean enlarges the person watching it rather than crushing him.
Stephen Dedalus grows from a small boy into a young man set on leaving Ireland to make art. The prose matures sentence by sentence with him, from baby talk to fierce argument.