| Creator | Title | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sculptor: unknown | Niobe |
Human action is beautiful. |
Life is movement. |
| Composer: Alfredo Catalani | Ebben? Ne andrò lontana (aria from La Wally) |
Longing is the overall emotional tone of the music. The lyric gives reason to this overall tone. |
Sadness at having to leave forever the place where you were happy once. |
| Painter: Ettore Tito | La Gomena (Towing a Boat) |
There is great effort in life, and a woman can be the master of it. This painting is a curious combination of romantic heroism and 19th century genre naturalism. It has a visual dynamism and dramatic content that is strongly romantic, yet the subject is the prosaic task of pulling a boat out of the water. |
The will and the power of a woman. Implacable determination. |
| Director: Oliver Stone | Wall Street |
There are bad people in power who use ordinary people as pawns in their endless pursuit of money. Those who are not ruthless are sheep to be slaughtered by the rich and powerful. Greed is bad. |
Financiers are amoral money-grubbing backstabbers, i.e., desire for money corrupts |
| Architect: Guarino Guarini | Real Chiesa di San Lorenzo (Royal Church of St. Lawrence) |
The world is perfected. The joy of seeing complexity that is simplicity, i.e., that the rich complex vision arises from simple elements which because of their arrangement provide layers of visual thrills. |
Complex, soaring geometric order. |
| Author: Nevil Shute | Trustee from the Toolroom |
A feeling of gentleness, kindness and generosity towards good people in the world. |
The importance of pursuing one's personal values. |
| Director: Raymond De Felitta | Two Family House |
Feelings of benevolence and optimism about life. Happiness comes from making choices for your own good. |
Going after what you want in life; Don't be stopped by conventional standards of the people around you. It takes courage to be selfish. |
| Director: Carroll Ballard | Black Stallion |
Everything is possible between boy and beast, between an innocent human and mother nature. |
Man and nature in harmony. At least this is the theme of the first half of the movie. See "Description" and "Context" info below for more on this comment. |
| Dancers: Torvill and Dean | Flying Fish |
A heightened sense that Life is fantastically unbounded by daily cares. Life is imbued with unlimited potential and ease of movement. |
Life is light and fluid. |
| Director and Screenwriter: Richard Curtis | Love Actually |
Romantic love, family love, filial love, and the love of friendship are of central importance to human existence, and are possible to achieve. |
Wonderful experiences of love are found in many forms and places. |
| Director: Marshall Herskovitz | Dangerous Beauty |
The world is a horrible split of conventional marital morality vs. honest but promiscuous morality. The way to live requires one sacrifice one's body for one's soul. |
|
| Composer: Franz Lehar | Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) |
Love brings gaiety and joy to life. |
Love can be gay and tender, solemn and lighthearted, painful and joyous. |
| Author: Henry Kitchell Webster | Real Adventure, The |
Life is wonderful as long as you realize that life has to be earned the hard way. |
Creating your self is the only way to live. |
| Shute, Nevil: | Landfall |
Heroes and Heroines are self-made, by anyone at any level of intelligence who seriously pursues what is important in their lives. |
Truth will triumph -- with perseverance. |
| Domenichino: | Head of a Bearded Man |
Pensive, worried, detached qualities of humanity |
Worry is the way of the world. |
| Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright | Robie House |
The world is open and has sweeping, unending possibilities. |
The essence of a house as shelter, and providing a sense of strength and privacy. That is, a structure that exudes strength through its massive cantilever and massive brick and stone forms, along with its big overhangs sheltering the windows to create a sense of privacy and enclosure, in its urban situation. |
| Director: Fredi Murer | Vitus |
If you have the will, you can find the way to live the way you want. |
Living your life your own way is the only right way. |
| Rand, Ayn: | Anthem |
The book starts out psychologically dark and disorienting because of the protagonist struggling with the radically collectivist world he was born into. But what shows even in the early pages, and grows to the climax is the triumphant struggle of a rare few who break free of the yoke of total mind control and become free to live a life as a conceptual human and rediscover what it means to be an individual. Thrilling and emotionally satisfying (unless the reader is a committed determinist.) |
Ego and using one's individual mind is the core of being human. |
| Author: Emma Lazarus | The New Colossus |
Benevolent celebration of liberty as a beacon to a troubled world. |
A marvelous land of liberty offers welcome to the oppressed of the world. |
| Composer: Giuseppe Verdi | Attila (live performance) |
Life is a mix of strength, heroism, romantic passion. The work is a long complex opera, so it has many other lyrical emotions as part of it, but this covers the basic sense of life. |
Loving a heroic woman leads to death |
| Sculptor: Michelangelo Buonarotti | David |
Man is a strong, indomitable creature who has the intelligence to overcome terrible odds. |
[requires assumption of some context of this work -- not a "cold" introduction to it]: A man able to face a daunting task, with tremulous calm and determination. This is the depiction of the David/Goliath story of the Bible in which David takes on the much more formidable Goliath and wins. |
| Dancers: Torvill and Dean | Bolero |
Harmony, grace exist. |
Two people as one. |
| Author: Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged |
Life can be good; Men are competent to live happily; The world can be a shining, happy place to exist, if one is free. But novel also presents a dark, dystopian world to help make real that positive view. |
The crucial value of the human mind. |
| Painter: William Hosner | Her Face to the Wind |
One gets the feeling that the young woman is able to stand strong in the world, with panache and beauty all at once. |
Facing life in a fresh, strong, vivacious way. |
| Maugham, W. Somerset: | Of Human Bondage |
Life is a fearful gray spread of actions and in-actions without genuine values. We are all deformed in mind or spirit and should accept convention as demanded by those around us. |
Man's life is outside his control. Conventionality is the final ideal. |