Art

“These enumerated consequences are particularly conspicuously and strongly crystallized in just those contemporary ‘representatives-of-art’ who are the ‘manipulators’ of the contemporary theaters there, and they are particularly strongly crystallized in them because, always performing the roles of beings similar to themselves, whose Being and significance in the process of their existence are ordinarily far superior to their own, and also, as I have already said, being themselves really almost nonentities, they with their already wholly automatized Reason, gradually acquire false notions about themselves.

“With such an already quite automatized ‘consciousness,’ and completely ‘nonsensical feelings,’ they feel themselves to be immeasurably superior to what they really are.

“I must confess, dear Hassein, that though during our earlier visits to the surface of that planet of yours and also at the beginning of this last sojourn there, I went about everywhere and had various relations with those three- brained beings who have taken your fancy, I scarcely ever felt in my common presence a genuine impulse of being pity for the infinitely unhappy Fate of these favorites of yours due to circumstances hardly depending on themselves at all.

“But when, towards the end of that sixth sojourn there, certain of them were formed with the kind of inner presence which is now possessed by all the representatives of almost all the branches of that art of theirs, and when these newly arisen types taking part in the process of ordinary being-existence on the basis of equal rights with the other three-brained beings there happened to get into the field of the reception of my sight with their already exaggerated, inner, abnormal, what is called ‘being-self-appreciation,’ then they served as a shock for the beginning of the arising in me of the impulse of pity, not only for them themselves, but also for all these unfortunate favorites of yours in general.