Abstract
Bathos-it is something that many of us fear we might find ourselves having to experience in the face of art. Who has not gone to art in need of something, requiring to be healed in some way, yet nervous that magic might not make an appearance that evening-anxious that one might have to leave at the end laden down with the depressing thought that one had never managed to transcend the literal fact that, for example, one had been sitting in a theater watching a play? When we return outside, do we not want that slightly far-away look in our eyes, that secret smile that says that whilst we were in the theater we were not just in the theater? Do we not desire to be able to feel that we “lost ourselves” and yet, at the same time, were able to find the person we had lost in the first place, the person whose disappearance instigated our being drawn toward art: in other words, ourselves?