Interesting comment by Walter Benjamin. In his essay on Franz Kafka, he writes:
What Kafka could see least of all was the gestus. Each gesture is an event- one might even say, a drama- in itself, the stage on which this drama takes place is the world theatre which opens up towards heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco- who was the patron saint of the expressionists- the gesture remains the decisive thing, the centre of the event.
I'll return to this in a post I'm preparing on the baroque, along with a hundred other things.
In the meantime, merry Christmas to AHT's readers.
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