Digital imaging seems, at this point, to have surpassed the human

mind in its capacity to represent visual complexity. Ratatouille’s moist

nose in the Pixar movie was more realistic than the moist nose of my

pet rat Rata2ille, and the spatial hijinks of Spiderman’s action were too

fast and disorienting to be processed accurately by anything but a

computer.

There seems an obvious parallel in the writing of Henry James, who

plumbed impossible emotional depths with his description. The wending

sentences (all the more unbelievable for the fact that they were dictated)

and mental exposition suggested a level of consciousness so complex

as to paralyze.

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