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<span
style='mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;'><font size="4">The Modern Taste</font><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:150%;mso-pagination:
none; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>FROM the standpoint of artistic and literary taste and culture, the
present world is a thing of extremes. On one side, it is trying hard to
discover something very noble, and on the other, it is sinking into a vulgarity
which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, of two or three centuries
ago. In those times people who were not cultured were crude, but their
crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much perversion in
it-there was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, perversion
also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, remains on
level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that is to say, it is
not only ignorant or stupid, it is ugly, dirty, repulsive, it is deformed, it
is vile, it is extremely low. What makes it so is the wrong use of the mind. If
there were no mind, this perversion would not exist. Now what is ugly is ugly
from all points of view.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:12.2pt;line-height:
150%;mso-pagination:none; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>There are things that are considered beautiful
these days. I have seen photographs and reproductions which are frightfully
vulgar in the perverted sense, and yet people are uproarious about them and
find them beautiful. That means there is something there which has not only no
culture and development, but has developed in the wrong way, that is to say, is
deformed, which is worse, for it is much more difficult to straighten a perverted
and deformed object than to enlighten that which is merely ignorant or without
education.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:12.7pt;line-height:
150%;mso-pagination:none; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>I believe there are certain things that have become
great instruments of perversion and among them I name the Cinema. The Cinema
could have been, and I hope one day it will be, an instrument of education and
culture. But for the moment it is largely an instrument of perversion, a truly
hideous perversion: perversion of taste, perversion of consciousness, a moral<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

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<span style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;
'>Page – 146<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;mso-line-height-alt:11.75pt;
mso-pagination:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>and even a physical ugliness. And yet it is something
which can be serviceable for education, for progress, for artistic culture and
growth. It can be made a means for the spread of the sense of the beautiful and
the creation of things beautiful in a way much more general and accessible to
all than was possible by the older methods. But what could have been better, is
not better but has become worse.</p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:.15in;mso-line-height-alt:
11.75pt;mso-pagination:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0'>As I said, we are in a period of excesses; we move
from one excess to another. If it is not an excess of zeal towards perfection,
we fall back into the opposite excess of perversion. As we live in the midst of
such a world, if we carefully note we shall find that we automatically share in
the universal vulgarism, unless we are watchful over ourselves and bring down
into our being the light of our highest consciousness; at every step we run the
risk of grave errors of taste, in matters spiritual also.<o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

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<span style='font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;
'>Page – 147<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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