Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

Dickens at his deepest and largest, and life in America today: what is the relation between them? In “Good Nature, Dickens, & Power,” you’ll see something completely new: that good nature is not a matter of being pleasant—there is nothing more important and truly demanding in the human self. Learn what good nature really is. Learn about something big going on in the American people now. You will find an entirely new and hopeful understanding of yourself and humanity in the remarkable new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the lecture Imagination Has Emphasis, given in 1971 by Eli Siegel. It is great as literary criticism; great, also, in its understanding of people, including the understanding of what every person is looking for. And it is great in how this comprehension is expressed—in spoken prose that is vivid, rich, at ease, beautiful.

Mr. Siegel is discussing G.K. Chesterton’s 1906 book Charles Dickens. He is showing the importance of emphasis in beauty, when the emphasis is sincere—that is, when it is fair also to nuance, to the depths of things. Chesterton’s prose at its best, he shows, has this emphasis, this sense of things as alive and mattering, even as there are mystery and shadow. We need to see that emphasis, feel it, understand it, and welcome it, because it stands for what Aesthetic Realism shows to be our largest desire: to like the world on an honest basis.

There is a central fight in everyone, Aesthetic Realism explains, between this desire to feel meaning in things, to have even an agogness about them—and a competing desire to have contempt. Contempt is “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” A huge and easy way of feeling superior to the world is by flattening things, making them dull, robbing people of their emphatic and subtle meaning, blotting out the true life within them. From this contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, come all human cruelty and injustice—including the cruelty and injustice now afflicting America. From contempt too comes the feeling of emptiness and flatness that millions of people have….Read more