July 21, 2000
This Crazed Human
Moment
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Once, describing Gericault's great shipwreck canvas, novelist Julian
Barnes asked how catastrophe gets turned into art. He wrote, "We have
to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have
to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to
justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally.
Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment?
Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is
for."
 
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