We had four critics today: Henry James, Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin and Oscar Wilde. The last has so many delightful quotes that I think I'll just put down the one mentioned today that I had never heard previously--" Every portrait is a portrait of the painter." And I also really loved Henry James' -- " I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them."

We then discussed what Keats meant by negative capability, and it is this: when the ego disolves so completely that things which are created can encounter any sort of persona, situation or what have you; the world created is what's relevant. Shakespeare is the main example of this, which is why trying to assign what Shakespeare personally believed from the content of his characters philosophy's is pointless, because it is the characters who say them. Which is why he can have wise words ("To thine own self be true.") in the mouth of an alazon (Polonius).

And this tied in with the notion of nonsense(ie. Lewis Carrol, Finnegans Wake , Wallace Stevens), which we have because it short-circuits the need or impulse to didacticism. It can reach the point where one experiances what it is, rather than asking what it means. Which is what Walter Pater was attempting to say when he said "All the arts aspire to the condition of music." Because music doesn't really have a peg-downable meaning. It is what it is, what it is.