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

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

The reality we cook up is quite distinct from what actually exists. By this we also seem to posit that with reality there could be more than one version of the truth: an objective unchanging reality – the Kantian thing-in-itself - ontologically akin to mathematics; and then there is the reality we actually perceive which is subject however to constraints borne of both nature and nurture. W hen I have a camera in my hand I am like one of those small pesky dogs: I snap , snap, snap all the time. But this profligate output rarely translates to good quality. There is always some blemish with my photos: either they are out of focus or the sun is behind the subject - so ill-composed that I cannot even pass it off as a silhouette - or part of the head has been guillotined or, more often than not, a mix of all of these in the same shot. I therefore recently bought myself a DSLR camera in the hope that it will help me with learning to take better pictures. As part of this exercise in self-impr