Critics often translate important books - write them again, as it were, in the fashionable intellectual jargon. And then the books are no longer themselves. They have been borrowed by Culture, with a capital C. There are two things here that we must clearly distinguish. One is the work of art with its direct effect on people. The other is a work of art as a cultural commodity, as a piece of society's property in Culture. In the second form, art becomes a fertilizer for the cultivation of languages, vocabularies, intellectual styles, ornaments, degrees, honors, prizes, and all the rest of that. That's Culture with a capital C. That's what I'm talking about. And this is what always happens. Our model for it is the Christian religion, which started with faith and ended with churches.
So let's here it for visceral responses to the written word. How does it make you feel, not how does it make everyone else feel, so you have to feel the same?
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