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Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
Oscar Wilde
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Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

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Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice__ mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes.

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Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.