“Poor Sebastian. Whether I liked it or not, he and I were the same kind, sensitive plants who felt everything very strongly, our lily-white hands clasped to our frail chests, earnestly importuning: ‘Lord, I do fear/Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year/My soul is all but out of me. Let fall/No burning leaf–prithee, let no bird call.’ My old neighbor Dina Sandusky was another such teabag who hadn’t steeped quite long enough in the pot. So was Felicia and so, come to think of it, were all the people I tended to attract, except Ted. In a science fiction movie, our species would have been depicted as gelatinous quivering forms with two giant rubber eyeballs on springs, gaping mouths with oversized taste buds, extruded bundles of nerve endings, our primary functions gustatory, aesthetic, contemplative, and emotional. What good were we? Maybe we served as processing plants for the psychic by-products of commerce, politics, advertising, technology, the excess emotions of Type-A super-achievers with no time to deal with such useless things themselves; their raw passions and inchoate yearnings left them and found us, blew across our inner landscapes, strummed the aeolian harps of our rib cages, caused seismic tremors in our brain pans.”
Kate Christensen, Jeremy Thrane
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
An ArtsJournal Blog