AustLit

'Don't let that quote up there scare you. My interest in this essay is 'my interest in', my curiosity about, envy. Operating more as Nietzschean difference than as a negating, the 'vs', in other words, is active rather than adversarial. The take-home - to save your reading on - pertains to dosage. While grim to experience, envy insists; it isn't going anywhere. Even as visual trace, as word, it cuts a compelling figure. Four letters, in their uppercase guise: sloping, canyonesque, stalactite-mite-like. The 'E' faces its companions - who wait, lined up - and it contemplates its relation to them. They occupy space nearby, are proximate, parallel, but do not coincide with the 'E'. Envy, as philosopher Agnes Heller reminds us in 'A Theory of Feelings', tends to occur most virulently between 'similars', not across starker hierarchies.' (Publication abstract)