Recalling the way a work of art made me feel is often more durable than other kinds of memory. I can often remember how I felt when I read a novel, for example, without having a good recollection of its plot. What remains after looking at a painting is not an exact imprint of the image in the mind, but rather the feeling it gave me, a feeling that I sometimes must struggle to name because emotions as experienced in the body are often cruder than the words we assign to them. Visceral responses to an image, however, are inevitably avenues to meaning. It isn’t always clear why a picture affects us the way it does, but for me, pursuing that mystery is the single most fruitful way to discovery. As Henry James once wrote, “In the arts, feeling is meaning.”
—Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)
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