Betty:

   The questions that your are asking (so nicely and modestly) are the
   questions that intellectuals of one sort or another--philosophers,
   critics, aestheticians, historians, and even artists--have been
   asking themselves and eachother for centuries (millenia?) They are
   hard to answer to anyone's (let alone everyone's) satisfaction.  But I
   do think that raising the questions out loud and in your own mind as
   serious ones, and worth engaging with, is in itself a pretty good
   answer.

   Eric Siegel
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