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PARTISAN REVIEW
lacks that reciprocal interpenetration with adjacent parts of life
which constitutes life-as-a-whole. It is like an island in life determin–
ing its beginning and end according to its own formative powers and
not-like the part of a continent-also according to those of adjacent
territories. This factor of decisive boundedness, lifting an adventure
out of the regular course of a human destiny, is not mechanical but
organic: just as the organism determines its spatial shape not simply
by adjusting to obstacles confining it from right and left but by the
propelling force of a life forming from inside out, so does an ad–
venture not end because something else begins; instead, its temporal
form, its radical being-ended, is the precise expression of its inner
sense.
Here, above all, is the basis of the profound affinity between
the adventurer and the artist, and also, perhaps, of the artist's at–
traction to adventure. For the essence of a work of art is, after all,
that it cuts out a piece of the endlessly continuous sequences of per–
ceived experience, detaching it from all connections with one side or
the other, giving it a self-sufficient form as though defined and held
together by an inner core. A part of existence, interwoven with the
uninterruptedness of that existence, yet nevertheless felt as a whole,
as an integrated unit- this is the form common to both the work of
art and the adventure. Indeed, it is an attribute of this form to
make us feel that in both the work of art and the adventure the whole
of life is somehow comprehended and consummated-and this irre–
spective of the particular theme either of them may have. Moreover,
we feel this precisely because the work of art exists entirely beyond
life as a reality; the adventure entirely beyond life as an uninterrupted
course intelligibly connecting every element with its neighbors.
It
is
because the work of art and the adventure stand over against life
(even though in very different senses of the phrase) that both are
analogous to the totality of life itself, even as this totality presents it–
self in the brief summary and crowdedness of a dream-experience.
For this reason, the adventurer is also the extreme example of
the a-historical individual, of the man who lives in the present. On
the one hand, he is not determined by any past (and this marks
the contrast between him and the aged, of which more later); nor,
on the other hand, does the future exist for him.
~
extraordinarily
