Page 189 - Costellazioni 5

ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

Fig. 1: Guercino, c. 1618-22 in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica,
Rome. Picture from Wikipedia Commons. Note the inscription on the
stone under the skull: ET IN ARCADIA EGO.

or, of recognizing, at an even higher level of generalization, the link
between birth and death.
It is the body that inevitably leads the brain to what is surely –
at least in the short term – a saving, salutary, generalization. Short
term, that is, because the process is a loop, and the generalization is
promptly and inevitably adjusted by recourse to bodily experience.
The pastoral genre may be as unquenchable as it is because it knows
how to display a toggle between our human appreciation of the special
intelligence of the body and the equally pleasing rewards that the ap-
preciation itself produces, namely a participation in abstract systems
of moral and aesthetic judgment. These la er are then again modified
and adjusted according to the body’s experience.

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