Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

As important as anything in our lives, and for America today, is the subject of this magnificent issue of TRO, titled “Emotion and Sentences.”  What do sentences—thought, said, or written down, even in an email or text—have to do with how we hope to, need to, feel? You’ll see why it’s vital to understand what makes a sentence honest and beautiful, or dishonest and deeply ugly. Indispensable knowledge that can enable one to have emotions one longs for, strengthening to oneself and the world: this is in “Emotion and Sentences,” the stirring new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Here is part 2 of Beginning with Sentences, a lecture of 1976 by Eli Siegel. It is, powerfully, about literature and emotion. It is about the immediate, hour-by-hour, life of every person, whether one thinks one is interested in literature or not.

Nothing matters more about any human being than the kind of emotions he or she has, goes after, and wants to cause in others. Inseparable from that is: how much the person goes after knowing, goes after truth.

In the lecture, Mr. Siegel is using as text Celia Townsend Wells’s 1962 collection Prose and the Essay. He reads and comments on individual sentences in English literature, sentences that contain important emotion. And here I quote a statement Mr. Siegel made early in this talk, on which I commented in our previous issue. It is great in itself—as sentence, as philosophic explanation, and as urgently needed knowledge for the hoping and puzzled life of everyone. He said: “Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life….” Read more