Robert Haas

The way in which art creates desire, I guess that__ everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn__ come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? _ To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan__] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn__ know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say __nnameable,_ but there__ a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that__ why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime_ Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.