Furthermore , what lies beyond perception for Schopenhauer is what he calls will , a constantly striving force that embodies everything . The Play does allude to a reality that ‘ human nature could not bear the strain ’ of , and so to read this Play is to try and go past the world as representation , to perceive formless will . Schopenhauer , too , says that the ‘ artist allows us to look into the world through his eyes ’, and it ’ s this flagging of ownership , ‘ his eyes ’, that gestures toward this inherent instability ( and fallibility ) of reality as we experience it .
We have in ‘ The Mask ’ another artist who tries to show us the world they see , but this time the artist looks to capture life as art . The artist in question — the narrator ’ s friend , Boris — has a chemical formula that can turn any living thing to ‘ to the purest marble .’ After demonstrating the effects of the formula on a flower to Alec , the narrator , Boris remarks , ‘ What sculptor could reproduce it ?’. Here , Boris , through his art , wants to bring the world he sees to life by inversely taking life away from things and turning them into art . Every depiction of
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something , then , comes with a cost . Meanwhile Alec , who is also a painter , returns to his muse who , ‘ unwillingly dawdling through a series of poses for [ the painting ], today refused all bribes to be good ’. After sending the boy away , Alec says , ‘ it took me the rest of the afternoon to undo the damage I had done ’. In comparison to Boris ’ s instantaneous transformation of something living into a piece of art , the painstaking process of painting appears tedious and taxing , and not nearly as efficacious as Boris ’ s process . Chambers knows that this process is tempting to a sculptor , as the process merely solidifies whatever the artist wishes to depict — a dream , I imagine , for Alec and his fidgeting muse . Here is a world , Chambers asserts , that allows the artist to present the world as they see it , even if it means solidifying lifeforms to achieve that beauty . It ’ s no surprise that the story ’ s love interest , Geneviève , should come to submerge herself in this pool of liquid , then , as a kind of Faustian cost to the deal .
[ S takes a few minutes to think ].
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