MATHETΩN

Once, and for millennia, people painted human figures on their jars, carved them into their city gates, made pillars and pilasters of them, wove them into tapestries, painted domed heavens full of them, made paintings of them bent over books or dreaming at windows or taking their ease on the banks of rivers. Human figures decorated lampstands and soup tureens and the spines of books.

Now they seem never to be used decoratively, as things pleasing in themselves. Advertising uses them to part us from our money, implying that we should compare ourselves and our lot to the supposedly acquirable condition of well-being these insinuating images represent to us. … We defend ourselves from the appeal they have for us, just as, if they were [vendors or cadgers in the] flesh, we would resist, or take offense at, their earnest gaze and their firm handshake.

It seems to me that, when we lost our aesthetic pleasure in the human presence as a thing to be looked at and contemplated, at the same time we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it was also grievous or terrible, as the epics and the tragedies and the grandest novels testify. Now when we read history, … we assume that nothing is what it appears to be, that it is less and worse … .