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Hazel: Deanie, honey, do you think you still love him?
She removes her white hat and looks ahead to her new future with a wise, unspoken understanding and acceptance. She has calmed inner conflicts, disappointments, and struggles and put herself back together after the painful shattering of her intense, first youthful love. With new awareness, she realizes she has outgrown the very different, still good-natured Bud that she once loved and worshipped. Deanie has put aside youthful exuberance, grieving, and denial of love to move forward. She has also gained strength from what remains - the memories of her "splendor in the grass."
As she narrates (in voice-over) and remembers the words of the Wordsworth's poem Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, taught to her by her schoolteacher, Deanie peacefully and fully answers the question about her loss of love - one that has finally been resolved:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, but rather find
Strength in what remains behind.[i]
This is an excert from Elia Kazan masterpiece written by William Inge, based on William’s Wordsworth "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". A tale that tells a story of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak.
What we have now is a state of anything goes, a free for all. It must not be confused with a loss of standards, for most contemporary art aims, as usual, for the highest standards of excellence. Rather, it consists in the co-existence of numerous standards, sometimes called pluralism, in which no one style dominates.
Until recently the mark of a civilized person was exclusiveness. We talked about ‘exclusive’ shops and ‘exclusive’ schools as though ‘exclusive’ were a term of praise. Now we know that to present ourselves as morally and socially acceptable we have to be inclusive.
Hence the rise of all those politically correct terms such as Sexism (with an eye to including women), Ageism (usually with the aim of including old or young people), Racism, Specialism (used by animal rights campaigners), etc, urging us to be open to other religions, other cultures, and other sexual orientations.
William Morris, in his nineteenth-century News from Nowhere, created a utopia in which people integrated art into their lives, so that people valued having a few beautiful things more than an ugly many things. More recently, Theodore Roszak saw art as a major source of an alternative vision of sensibility, of organic, earth-based values, and believed that as we became more creative the less we would consume earth-destroying mass-produced consumer goods.
So are artists an act of random choices leading to entropy?*
*A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity, which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The idea is named for thermodynamicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), who advanced that the known universe arose as a random fluctuation, similar to a process through which Boltzmann brains might arise and are often referred to in the context of the "Boltzmann brain paradox" or "problem".
The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe.
This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity.[ii]
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