|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: in the interest of other writers, to explain the necessity for such
didactic preliminaries,--since they have roused a protest from certain
ignorant and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing
the generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without
gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?
The events of human existence, whether public or private, are so
closely allied to architecture that the majority of observers can
reconstruct nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of life,
from the remains of public monuments or the relics of a home.
Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to
organized nature. A mosaic tells the tale of a society, as the
|
