the dead serial moments of ordinary life

Prosaic. Ordinary. What is it to be modern except to be at ease with a simple, ordinary life? And yet, isn't that also a very ancient way of thinking?

K. Clark:

16th c. : work and humility. Northern Man: faith, sincerity, personal piety.

17th c. Holland: Divine authority replaced by experience and observation. 'Does it work,' not: 'Is it God's will?'

In painting: the solid, commonplace, worldly figures of bourgeois democracy. Realism and practicality, responsibility and the sheer absence of showiness. The first stirrings of a world of leisure, movement, independence.

The ordinary can also descend into the trivial and life in the flatlands can produce a wild intoxication with the exotic, risk; excess as a way of breaking out of boredom, all sorts of bourgeois escapes (Levinas) and mindless diversions. The unbearable lightness of being.

How to re-interpret religious truths, sacred history in the light of ordinary experience (Rembrandt?) Through an emotional truth, a story?

Vermeer: truth without convention, custom. Nature as it is. The natural light of the mind. Rooms full of light, shining enclosed space.

To see things clearly, precisely, mathematically. The linear prose of the world, of time. An awareness of time's ending.This does not cease to be any less mystical than the 'enchanted' world it comes to replace. The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.