It is in the fields of the arts that the reductive, life-diminishing effect of the loss of all sense of form is today most disquieting; for it is in their arts that the creative energies of a people are best displayed and can best be measured...
The point I would make -- and which I believe was also Nietzsche's -- is that form is the medium, the vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization...
The only term of comparison I could think of at the time was the poetic art of the sonnet; for there too is a very demanding form; yet the poet acquires within it a force and range of expression that he could never have gained without it, and thereby a new order of freedom...
(Joseph Campbell -- 'Myths To Live By')
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