Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes

What is it that makes a book be rightly called “great” and seen as a “classic”? And does that have anything to do with your own hour-to-hour life—including personal hopes and confusions and daily concerns? As the new issue of The Right Of shows, Aesthetic Realism answers those questions as nothing else ever has and in a way that can bring people clarity and great happiness. You’ll see new meaning in reality and your own life as you read “A Person, and the Wide World,” this richly informative issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part two of A Poem Is in the World—a powerful and also richly delightful lecture given by Eli Siegel in 1972. In it he spoke of those works called the Great Books—about which there has often been in people a sense of awe but also, often, discomfort and nervousness.

Many people have known, over the years, that such works as Aristotle’s Ethics and Milton’s Paradise Lost exist—works of might, like Homer’s Iliad, Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, Dante’s Inferno, and more. Yet the existence of such works has seemed, too, so disconnected from oneself, from one’s own thoughts, desires, worries. And so, ever so many persons have felt unattracted to such works. But then, they’ve also felt ashamed—felt they themselves were inadequate, were unable to have a certain largeness of emotion, and depth and scope of knowledge.

Eli Siegel, in the present lecture, has one feel what a so-called great book or classic really is, and has one feel, Oh, this has to do with ME: this, in all its largeness, is connected with me, and my own tumult and hopes. The basis of the lecture is this Aesthetic Realism principle, classic itself in its universality and immediacy: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”…Read more