Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

The new issue of TRO, “We Are Still Self and World,” honors the human self through understanding that’s accurate, kind, critical—and found nowhere but in Aesthetic Realism. There’s comprehension of the very best in us, and also of what weakens us most. This TRO answers, really answers, one of our most important questions: What is individuality? And it has some of the most beautiful and vital writing on that subject you will ever meet. All this in “We Are Still Self and World,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we present, through three very different writings by Eli Siegel, the basis of how Aesthetic Realism sees the self.

Our self is, of course, the dearest, most intimate thing to each of us—even though, also, we can be disgusted with it, and confused by it no end. Aesthetic Realism explains that the central matter in everyone’s life—whatever we’re in the midst of—is how we see the relation between our self and that wide, multitudinous, specific, inclusive, puzzling, great, changing, continuing thing which is the world-not-ourselves. Informally, charmingly, and truly, Mr. Siegel described the world as that which “begins where our fingertips end.”

In the third chapter of his Self and World, written in the 1940s, there is this description of the question “facing every human being…: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself?” And in exact, kind prose, Mr. Siegel continues:

We all of us start with a here, ever so snug and ever so immediate. And this here is surrounded strangely, endlessly, by a there. We are always meeting this there: in other words, we are always meeting what is not ourselves, and we have to do something about it. We have to be ourselves, and give to this great and diversified there, which is not ourselves, what it deserves. [P. 91]

This writing itself, as verbal art, has a structure, a sound, that is at once snugness and width, ranging and point…Read more