somebody. This normally implies that someone will listen to, understand, and probably help you in some personal, caring manner. Further, if you want to read something, normally you anticipate human-to-humanlike relations with a book’s heroes, and this is exactly what attracts you.
Now, the personal statements in the second group should also be taken cum grano salis. When you say “I want to drive a blue Cadillac,” you personalize a functional thing which has no soul. Engaging in human-to-humanlike relationships is not in the nature of a car. Nothing about it is supposed to invoke love or hatred or any other purely human feeling. It is only functional, powerful, comfortable, and so forth.
To sum up, a human being can develop a personal attitude toward anything or may treat other human beings like consumer goods (an extreme case, for instance, is slavery). The question is: What is natural here? When you wanted to read The Lord of the Rings, that was personal by nature, like wanting to meet another person. This is not an irrelevant or surprising analogy at all.
If a work of art presents another real world along with its own heroes, events, and laws, and if this other world talks to your soul, then you cannot treat it like food or even a tool. It is different from these in principle, in nature. You do feel a personal engagement, much like one with other people. It is this human-to-human aspect that makes artwork vital for both individuals and society as a whole.
Form in a Work of Art
To return to one of my premises, a piece of art is a message. It travels from the author to the audience and is about the author’s true feelings, ideas, and indispensable inventions. How is this message built? We know already that message paradoxically presents a new virtual world that is strange (and therefore interesting) and, at the same time, is ours, understandable, and touching (and therefore important).
What makes a piece of art the projection of a new world? The work consists of ideas which are organized and expressed in some aesthetic form. Obviously, the ideas simply listed (remember a
