Eternity In An Hour (And 10 Minutes): Blake 2.0 – (Fringe Festival 2010)
by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 21, 2010
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake
William Blake belongs on Off-Off-Broadway. Or at least he would have appreciated it, because of his belief that Art should be about Imagination rather than style and fashion of what people expect a work to be like just so that it can become more commercially acceptable. He said in response to his contemporaries, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” He had strong beliefs in trying to touch the mind of God through soaring visions of what he believed beauty really was. By doing this, he was fundamental in the creation of Romanticism – which was the genesis of many other more modern movements in philosophy and the arts . . . either directly or by inspiration.
