Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

There’s no subject more urgent or deeper than that of this new issue of TRO. “What Kind of Emotion?” tells what great emotion is, and why we want to have it—yet why we also can be against having it. The art emotion is described, and its big, central meaning for everyone’s life. You’ll feel you can have the emotions you hope for, when you read “What Kind of Emotion?,” the groundbreaking new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We publish here the first part in our serialization of Beginning with Sentences, by Eli Siegel. This lecture, given in 1976, has enormous meaning for literature—and for the life, the feelings, the choices of every person now.

In it, Mr. Siegel reads and discusses sentences that are of English literature, and that arise from and can make for great emotion. Early in the talk he says something that, to my knowledge, no other philosopher or writer on the human self has said—and he says it in a sentence that is, itself, powerful and graceful, simple in its richness and kindness: “Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life.”

I love that quietly electric sentence, and have seen that it is true. As a means of commenting on it and introducing the first portion of the lecture, I am going to say some things about the tremendous matter of emotion—and great emotion. And I’ll do so through a series of points….Read more