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

Robert Delauney, Eiffel Tower (1911) (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) There are numerous ways in which the fourth wall can be transgressed. Then what is the role of the fourth wall as an inviolable boundary between fiction and reality? Secondly, is evidence of such infringements today a sign that society is becoming more self-reflexive in a quest to redefine the borders between fiction and the “real” world?                                                                                                             My new essay published in the July 2021 issue of Epoche Magazine

 It is a commonplace to claim that art imitates life. If so, art, in performing this mimesis, should respond also to our obsession and concern with temporality (time as experienced, not as measured, or human time as opposed to what the metaphysicians claim). How does art participate in this alchemy of smelting clock time into felt time? Read essay at Blue Labyrinths .

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations One day science will identify the neural correlates of joy. But, I do hope that the rainbow will not be unwoven so completely. Until then - or even after that - the delicious mystery of how we relate to music will never fade away. Salvador Dali, Dream of Venus (1939), Hiroshima Prefectural Art Gallery. Photo by Author ystery will remain in this world for the simple reason that our understanding of reality is limited - below are some reasons for it - and may forever remain so. And we will continue to be curious about this world around us because that is what made us human in the first place. The nature of reality : Angles in Science, Credit: IGIT (Own work)/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 Reality is much more than physical objects. We have abstract objects and structures that we cannot touch and feel directly. These include mathematics (which Colin McGinn felt formed a “third