我怀念的

What she says: i'm fine
What she means: The famous "Beauty is terror" quote in The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992) actually makes no sense at all in the context of the book. it is based on a misconception of beauty, or at least a very outdated one. in 1991, french philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote an essay in which he (based on the work of Edmund Burke) describes the difference between mere beauty and the sublime. whereas mere beauty comes down to perfection, a following of the rules of rhetorics and poetics established by the schools and academies and the tastes of their aristocratic public; the sublime is something that arises from a break, a defect, a certain ugliness. what refuses to be determined and grasped by rules and techniques creates an openness to the sublime. it is why plato and sophocles are sublime, whereas lysias and ion are merely perfect. the beautiful gives pleasure to its viewer. the sublime on the other hand unites pain, or terror, and pleasure. the sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening, of a total breakdown, a nothingness. it comes from the terror of death, suspended in art, thus becoming sublime pleasure. what the characters in the secret history are looking for is not beauty, they are looking for a bacchanal, a total disruption and derangement of the senses. they are searching the sublime. it is dyonisus, not apollo. beauty is not terror. the sublime is terror. donna tartt lied to us