Art has anticipated what we think of as experience

In 1955, we were told that this was fiction.

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But it had already become what’s called real.

The New Yorker, September 24, 1949

Look at Studebaker’s wardrobe for 1949, think of the then new jet plane acting a new role in the unchanging plot of dream, and you’ll understand that Studebaker wasn’t at all the first walk-on to carry a bag of props. What’s called an event is only one of infinitely many acts already staged in the past tense. Regardless of wardrobe, the last act every night everywhere is the one that darkens all the universe into background for a marquee.

And the marquee’s only words, always, are the three that glow Lasciate ogne speranza.

Down, down

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Allow nine seconds to view this modified image of the American financier Hetty Green (1834-1916). During the Gilded Age she was the richest woman in the United States, famed for that and notorious for her miserliness. The unmodified image can be found online, but I haven’t yet located information about the original photograph beyond a claim that it dates from 1913.