Vicarious exhibitionism

The fascist leader types are frequently called hysterical. No matter how their attitude is arrived at, their hysterical behavior fulfills a certain function. Though they actually resemble their listeners in most respects, they differ from them in an important one: they know no inhibitions in expressing themselves. They function vicariously for their inarticulate listeners by doing and saying what the latter would like to, but either cannot or dare not. (...) Hitler was liked, not in spite of his cheap antics, but just because of them, because of his false tones and his clowning. They are observed as such and appreciated. (...) The sentimentality of the common people is by no means primitive, unreflecting emotion. On the contrary, it is a pretense, a fictitious, shabby imitation of real feeling, often self-conscious and slightly contemptuous of itself. This fictitiousness is the life element of the fascist propaganda performances. The situation created by this exhibition may be called a ritual one. The fictitiousness of the propagandist oratory, the gap between the speaker's personality and the content and character of his utterances are ascribable to the ceremonial role assumed by and expected of him. This ceremony, however, is merely a symbolic revelation of the identity he verbalizes, an identity the listeners feel and think, but cannot express. This is what they actually want him to do, neither being convinced nor, essentially, being whipped into a frenzy, but having their own minds expressed to them. 

Theodor Adorno, "Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,"  

The Stars down to Earth, ed. Stephen Crook, Routledge, 1994;  pp. 224-225

new worlds

Le microscope nous découvre dans chaque objet, comme mille objets, qui ont échapé à notre connoissance. Combien y a-t-il dans chaque objet, découvert par le microscope, d'autres objets que le microscope lui-même ne peut découvrir? Que ne verrions-nous pas, si nous pouvions subtiliser toûjours de plus en plus les instrumens qui viennent au secours de notre vûë trop foible, & trop grossiere? Mais suppléons par l'imagination, à ce qui nous manque du côté des yeux; & que notre imagination elle-même soit une espece de microscope, qui nous représente en chaque atome mille Mondes nouveaux, & invisibles : elle ne pourra pas nous figurer sans cesse de nouvelles découvertes dans les petits corps; elle se lassera ; il faudra qu'elle s'arrête, qu'elle succombe, & qu'elle laisse enfin dans le plus petit organe d'un corps, mille merveilles inconnuës.

 

Fr. de Salignac, de la Mothe Fenelon, "Merveilles des infiniment petits",  

Démonstration de l'existence de Dieu (1712)

essence and tincture

Like Mathematics, like Contemplation, like 'Nonsense', Dream occupies a mental sphere of its own; and the debt owed to it by poetry, by all imaginative literature, is beyond computation. A poem may reveal its influence in essence or in tincture. (...) Fiction, too, no less than poetry differs widely in the degree in which the elements of dream have affected its conception and making. (...) An imagined 'character' makes his appearance in consciousness no less of his own volition as it were and no less complete than any similar apparition made manifest in a dream.

Walter de la Mare, 'Dream and Imagination', Behold, This Dreamer! (1939)

Windless pestilence

Luckless man

Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,

And, flinching from the insect's little sting, 

In pitiful security keeps watch, 

While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun, 

To which he prays, comes windless pestilence, 

Transparent as a glass of poisoned water

Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling;

She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,

Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,

And every breath of her's as full of ghosts

As a sunbeam with motes.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849), Death's Jest-Book