Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

My essay Aesthetic ineffability and the rebirth of the reader  was published in May 2020 on  Aesthetics Research Lab ,  a "digital think tank and resource, revolving around theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" conceived by Michael Spicher, PhD.  Here is the  link . This essay examine the idea that literature is as capable of giving rise to an experience of aesthetic ineffability as the other arts. Furthermore, the ineffable experience in literature may be a product of both the author and the reader, and that there is similarly a need for a confluence between the artist and viewer in other art forms too for ineffability to arise.

My essay  The Exile of Pessoa & Camus  was published in  The Punch Magazine  in May 2019 - and here is the  link. Poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) describes himself as someone who is an “exile from the country of which he had always considered himself a citizen…” Is it apposite to associate exile with someone who — apart from spending nine years in South Africa during his youth — essentially never stirred out of his native Portugal? This essay examines this question by comparing Pessoa to another famous exile, Albert Camus.

By being too distant and dispassionate could our writers, judges, social theorists and others in the public space be accused of not bestowing requisite warmth and empathy in their actions and pronouncements? Is it in other words proper to apply the above praxis of detachment in all human encounters that call for the use of both judgement and empathy and compassion? T he defendant is one of six accused of not having gone to the aid of several hundred women prisoners locked into a church that was later bombed by the Allies. All defendants were women guards at a Nazi satellite concentration camp near Auschwitz. Photo: Edward Onslow Ford , Justice , partie d'un monument au maharajah de Mysore During a moment in the trial the defendant does not apparently know what she should or could have done differently. She therefore poses that question to the judge asking him what he would have done. The judge replies that there are matters “one could not get drawn into”. By using the

The reality (however relative) and nature of time appear inexorable and inescapable. One way to cope with this fact is to tell others and share with them our thoughts, feelings and stories – a bit like unity in the face of a common enemy. “ F or whom am I writing this?” wonders eighty-two year old Iris Chase Griffen in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin . “For myself? I think not. I have no picture of myself reading it over at a later time, later time having become problematical. For some stranger, in the future, after I’m dead? I have no such ambition, no such hope.” [i] Many of us are afflicted by this bug for writing – writing in some form or the other, dashing off letters, composing something creative and, if nothing else, at least keeping diaries and journals. George Orwell thought that there were four great motives for writing and they are to be found to different degrees in every writer. We were firstly driven to write by “sheer egoism”, a “desire to seem clever, to be