That phrase “reality’s reflections” is self-explanatory, but perhaps I ought to clarity my own interpretation of it. Reflected reality is the essence of reality, the truer truth. When I was a child I played a pictorial game. I would, for example, observe a landscape: trees and clouds and horses wandering in grass; then select a detail from the overall vision–say, grass being in the breeze–and frame it with my hands. Now this detail became the the essence of the landscape and caught, in prismatic miniature, the true atmosphere of a panorama too sizable to encompass otherwise….All art is composed of selected detail, either imaginary or…a distillation of reality.
From “Ghosts in Sunlight” by Truman Capote (1967)
– January 2, 2014
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