Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333) - Northrop Frye

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.

Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life. (p. 149)

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.