/lit/ - Literature

>For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?

This verse has deeply affected the course of my life. I dropped out of school and became an artist because I take the meaning of soul very literally. When people talk about soullessness I believe there is some substance that is absent from the work due to the flawed vision of the painter. The hermeticists say that the same forms appear in an analogical way through the various levels of reality, so what you see in art, and what you hear in music, are the dichotomies playing out aesthetically. The Chinese of antiquity seem to have understood this too. The first principal of Chinese painting is
>"Spirit Resonance" (qiyun 气韵) or vitality (shengdong 生动), and seems to translate to the nervous energy transmitted from the artist into the work. The overall energy of a work of art. Xie He said that without Spirit Resonance, there was no need to look further.

>>19195118
Surely there must be something in there that you don't hate