28
PARTISAN REVIEW
life, more than Iife--that for which human life is a reach and
aspiration.
John Stuart Mill once defined matter as "the permanent possi–
bility of sensation." For Rilke reality is a call to perceive-but to per–
ceive as has never been perceived before-and to transform, to create
our own world which is essentially new. The world
is
the raw ma–
terial of the creator. It is not what a divine creator has in the be–
ginning wrought out of chaos; we are still confronted by the chaos
out of which we must create a world.
Not only the traditionalists have shrunk from this prospect. Plato
did too. He thought that what passes in time
is
merely an imperfect
explication of what is eternal. Time, he said, is the moving image of
eternity. Such otherworldliness slights the power of man. Art is the
eternal image of the moving. The flux
is
sound and fury signifying
nothing, but human
art
has fashioned works of such perfection that
men have thought the world must be a copy of what are in fact hu–
man creations. For man's deepest superstition demands that excel–
lence must have priority in time too. Nothing has ever prevailed
against it in the popular mind except the more recent superstition
that excellence must always appear late. But excellence, like ecstasy,
is always possible. And it is a fallacy to mistake our oblivion of time
for an experience of something transcendent and eternal. In truth,
it is only in some works of art that ecstasy endures.
