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

How should we see a world that has great beauty and good, but also evil and ugliness? There is no more important question for everyone’s life, and it’s what this issue of The Right Of deals with magnificently. You’ll learn why art, even when it’s about something unlikable, is enormously and logically hopeful—and hopeful for us at this very moment. The basis for comprehending yourself and what you’re meeting is in “Sentences—& Our Lives Right Now!,” the new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 3 of Eli Siegel’s great 1976 lecture Beginning with Sentences. It is great as literary criticism, and great in its value for human life, including the immediate life of everyone now.

Mr. Siegel discusses individual sentences in English literature that have in them, and can make for, large emotion. In this section, the sentences are by three writers of the early 18th century, and each of the sentences has to do with something very unlikable—something frightening, or ugly, or cruel, or all of those. And yet—the sentences are beautiful.

Why can ugliness or evil be told of beautifully? And if something bad is told of beautifully, does the beauty come from accuracy about that bad thing, or from an evasion or decoration of some kind? The answer is: a beautiful sentence dealing with something bad, unjust, cruel, arises from seeing that thing truly, not evading or decorating it….Read more