“I show you sorrow…”

I really like how Huxley shapes this generalisation about Goya by using a saying of the Buddha, augmented with a quote from Shakespeare, crowned with a wonderful departing observation. Should we be surprised that a man versed in history, philosophy and mystical religion, but with an sensitivity towards visual art, should unite them all in this kind of paragraph, a sort of highlight, scintillating passage in his whole essay on Goya written in 1950.

'"I show you sorrow," said the Buddha, "and the ending of sorrow"- the sorrow of the phenomenal world in which man, "like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep," and the ending of sorrow in the beatific vision, the unitive contemplation of transcendental reality. Apart from the fact that he is a great, and one might say, uniquely original artist. Goya is significant  as being, in his Later Works, the almost perfect type of the man who knows only sorrow and not the ending of sorrow."

 

“Aun Auprendo” means “I’m still learning.”