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| sym metrical cobweb quivering against the light in the woodshed, butterfly stretching its wings on a white windowsill, frothy anvil of a thunder cloud slowly piling into an afternoon sky, the darkness beneath it pulsing with flashes from unseen lightning. No sound. In all beauty there is sadness. Of two flowers that look exactly alike, but one is living, the other artificial, the living flower we see as more beautiful because we know it will soon wither and die. 10. Love's Illusion Art is, by definition, an illusion, even when of itself: it is not what it seems, even when no more than what it seems, yet all the more aspires to be more real than what it seems. It is remarkable that appearance can be, so to speak, sheared off  | reality, like a sheep's fleece, and yet can bear an allegiance to reality all the stronger in spite of that: to the reality that might appear if it could appear, if sensuous appearance were part of its nature; if the real could be sublimated in appearance. Art and beauty have uneasy relations: beauty is a touchstone of art, but art does not want to be limited by beauty, by what beauty up to now has been: it wants the freedom to be ugly, unreal, deceptive, even openly evil, to celebrate the demonic, to cow its viewer and baffle its audience. Art wants beauty and its other. In the name of truth? Sometimes. Sometimes just in the name of itself, its autonomy and freedom. And beauty is suspicious of art: the beautiful work of art, by disconnecting appearance from reality, has disconnected beauty as well from  | |||
