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the solution was, she suggested that a revival of the religious imagination,
the social and ethical imagination, was called for. When she was asked
how that should be brought about, her first reply was, we need to legis–
late morality, and she used civil rights legislation as an example. Her
second reply was, we need to get government out of people's lives.
It
seems contradictory, but it's not, because she was talking about getting
government into the lives of the poor and getting government out of the
lives of the rich. It's another example of this failure of rationality, where
what's required is imagination.
It seems to me that the great thing about the art of the Enlightenment
and the period just after it, to which my deepest aesthetic attachments are,
\
to Blake and Wordsworth, to Pushkin and Stendhal, and to Jane Austen,
was a wonderful mix of rationality with this new imagination of the
other.
It
did what Malraux also said art does.
It
pays attention not to the
large social construction but to the privacy and the individuality of all
human suffering. Out of that artists make images. Out of those images
reason can operate on and make the discriminations that might give us a
society of shared values. So the art I would call up out of this conference
is that art.
It
can be summarized in a couple of lines from American poets.
One of those is Walt Whitman's "I was a man, I was there. I suffered." A
greater and more complex one might be Emily Dickinson's, and
I'll
end
with her poem, "Theres a Certain Slant of Light":
There's a certain slant of light
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair, -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.
