Harvard University Press Blog

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

Many of us at HUP were saddened this week by the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Among those most moved were editor Lindsay Waters and designer Jill Breitbarth, who remain grateful to Sendak for allowing our use of an illustration from his accompaniment to Joel Agee’s translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea on the cover of our 2004 book A New History of German Literature. Below, Waters and Breitbarth recall how we came to use Sendak’s work.

Lindsay Waters:

For me German culture came alive in the drawings and artwork of artists who fled to America before and after World War II, from the artists who made Little Golden Books, Stefan and George Salter, and the book designers and illustrators inspired by them. It was a style, a tone of dark forests where children get lost within seconds of losing sight of their parents, all of a sudden menaced by scary creatures. Maurice Sendak captured and developed this style to and beyond the point of vertigo. He went to the heart of what was scary in German culture, just as he’d journeyed to the heart of American darkness with Herman Melville.

Our New History of German Literature begins with a spell, an account of the very first document consisting of what is recognizably German language, something written on the back of a Latin manuscript which is held in the monastery at Fulda. The German literary tradition is enchanted. Who better to convey that complex history than Maurice Sendak, whose work helped so many to feel that chilling fright for the first time? So we approached him for permission to use one of the illustrations from his edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It was like a dream come true when he decided eventually that our book was a project he was willing to be a part of. The person who’d made German language culture come alive for me was going to help bring our epic, thousand-page account of that culture to the world.

 

Jill Breitbarth:

Lindsay was eager to use one of Sendak’s illustrations from Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist for the jacket of A New History of German Literature, and I was thrilled to make a go of it. Getting permission to use the piece involved lots of phone calls between our camp and Sendak’s assistants. At one point, when a little tweaking was necessary, Sendak wished to speak directly with me. I was nervous thinking I would be talking with Sendak. I was such a fan.

We covered the design issues quickly and went right into politics. Sendak bemoaned the recent re-election of George Bush, that the war in Iraq had ever started, and that so many people close to him were dying. His passions were real and he had no qualms about sharing them with a person he’d never met. Sendak was respectful, and I felt I was talking with an honest man, sensitive to history and emotions.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

The British Museum’s major new exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, is being hailed as a milestone in the “public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.” As British Museum Director Neil MacGregor notes, the exhibition will “enable a global audience to deepen their understanding of the significance and history of the Hajj. In particular, it will allow non-Muslims to explore the one aspect of Islamic practice and faith which they are not able to witness, but which plays such a major part in forming a worldwide Islamic consciousness.”

As part of our ongoing relationship with the British Museum, we’ve just published the North American edition of the beautiful book designed to accompany the exhibition. Ventia Porter, the book’s editor and a Curator in the Museum’s Department of the Middle East, explains in her preface that the book is meant more as a companion to the exhibition than as a conventional catalogue:

Our intention has been to gather the history, the voices of pilgrims and the material culture associated with the Hajj together in one place. We felt this was greatly needed because the story of Hajj crosses so many very different disciplines, from religion, history and archaeology to anthropology, travel and art history, each of which often forms the subject of self-contained publications. We therefore brought together a group of distinguished scholars who themselves take us on a journey and help us delve deeper into the subject. Karen Armstrong invites us to look at Hajj within a broader context of pilgrimage; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem explains the rituals of Hajj and their meaning and also gives us an insight into the experience of a Hajj in rural Egypt. Hugh Kennedy explores the history of the Hajj in early Islam and then focuses on two key travellers. Nasir-i Khusraw and Ibn Jubayr, whose fascinating accounts provide such insight not only into the practicalities of the journey but the deeper meaning of why they undertook it. When you compare the writings of these early pilgrims with those of today it is clear that, although the method of travel and Mecca itself may have changed over time, the act of pilgrimage—that need to touch the holy place, the reactions to seeing the Ka‘ba at Mecca for the first time—have not changed at all. Robert Irwin picks up the history in the thirteenth century and, in a veritable tour d’horizon, he introduces us to more travellers and tells the story of Hajj during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, though into colonial times and up to the twentieth century. It then falls to Ziauddin Sardar to bring us up to the present day: he looks at how the enormous growth in numbers has changed Hajj in the modern era and demonstrates how it is organized today.

Running in parallel with the history of Hajj is the story of the material culture that surrounds it, whether paintings evoking the journey; archaeological finds from the Hajj routes; manuscripts, historic photographs and tiles illustrating the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina; certificates and pilgrim guides commemorating the direction of Mecca. In addition, there are the objects taken by pilgrims on Hajj or brought back as souvenirs, and the beautiful textiles made annually especially for the Ka‘ba. The works of photography, painting and sculpture by contemporary artists add a further dimension to the art of Hajj. All of these complement and personalize the history, allowing us to glimpse the experience through individuals, deepen our understanding and see how art has been used in the service of Islam. These objects, many of which are included in the exhibition, are illustrated throughout the book; some are highlighted in themed spreads on subjects such as “sacred geography,” the tiles of Mecca and Medina, the Futuh al-Haramayn manuscripts and the sacred textiles. There is also a focus on particular Hajj routes, with detailed maps: across Africa, from Syria and Cairo, and that remarkable endeavor, the Hijaz Railway.

You can get a sense of both the power and the beauty of the material included in the exhibition and book from this short video produced by the British Museum:

 

Tower of Lincoln Books

Next week, when the first visitors enter Ford’s Theatre’s new Center for Education and Leadership, they’ll be greeted by a stunning 34-foot tower comprised of thousands of copies of the over 15,000 published books on Lincoln. Take a look: 

 

That’s a lot of Lincoln books, and we’ve surely played a role in the proliferation. And we’re not stopping, either, at least not now, in the midst of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. We even have a new one this month from Harold Holzer, who has authored, co-authored, or edited over 30 books on Lincoln. A winner of the National Humanities Medal in 2008, Holzer is known as one of the country’s leading authorities on the political culture of the Civil War era. And, as it happens, he’ll be at the Center for Education and Leadership for its grand opening on President’s Day, February 20th, joining Michael Beschloss and Chris Matthews in a discussion of presidential leadership.

In the new book, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory, Holzer takes a fresh look at the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s most important—but, Holzer argues, most misunderstood and under-appreciated—piece of writing. He examines the Proclamation in three distinctive ways: as a brilliantly timed news event (using original sources to explain how it was variously withheld, leaked, published, promoted, and ultimately elevated into iconic status in the years before the historical neglect began); as a piece of literature (asking what modern Americans are to make of its leaden prose and suggesting that Lincoln’s subsequent orations on freedom represented the “poetry” to accompany and embellish its legalistic tone); and in terms of the popular art works it inspired, both for reputation-celebrating purposes after Lincoln’s assassination and martyrdom, and for commercial profit. The book, drawn from Holzer’s Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, is designed to shed new light on the increasingly contentious debate about the meaning of what Lincoln himself believed to be his greatest act and his most significant contribution to history—examining it in words and pictures, then and now.

Emancipating Lincoln can be thought of as presenting the life of the document, its original status as a collectible, as an inspiration for soaring oratory, and as a stimulus for reverential portraiture. Holzer draws heavily from previously neglected original sources, the existence of which may seem hard to believe, given all those Lincoln books in that tower. Even in their shadow, though, Holzer has written the first book to interpret the meaning of Lincoln’s most famous executive order as it was greeted by the news media, collectors, organizers of charity fairs, artists, sculptors and print publishers.

If you’re not in DC to see Holzer (and the tower) at Monday’s panel, be sure to follow his posts at Disunion, the Civil War blog from the New York Times.

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.

A Third Galileo

Works on Galileo have essentially shown us two views of his life and work—Galileo the astronomer and martyr of science, and Galileo the precursor of Newton. Mark Peterson’s new book, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, gives us a third view. Peterson’s is a Galileo with a more expansive understanding of mathematics than the other two familiar Galileos, one who is capable of a synthesis of the artistic and the mathematical in his own person, a Galileo interested in and indebted to Hellenistic culture.

Peterson, a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, explains the book’s origins:

The beginnings of this project were some observations about mathematics and the arts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. I was especially intrigued by some mathematical ideas that I had noticed in Dante, unexpected mathematical sophistication centuries before Galileo. I also became fascinated with Galileo, and I began to wonder where he had come from. This question seemed to organize my thoughts. What was Galileo’s intellectual inheritance, and how did it form him? Galileo’s education was in the humanities and the arts, so the question is a sprawling one. And even that is not enough, because Galileo’s ultimate enthusiasm was for mathematics, and that is another broad intellectual stream. Where all these streams mixed, that is where Galileo came from, or so I imagined. To understand it, I had to follow the streams back to their sources.

The book summarizes the classical legacy in mathematics and the sciences, and contains chapters on the Renaissance arts of poetry, painting, music, and architecture. We learn, for instance, that Galileo’s favorite poem was Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s epic of love, chivalry, and madness. The thread connecting the book’s sections, writes Peterson, is mathematics: “Implicitly I ask, what did mathematics mean for the arts? And what did the arts mean for mathematics?”

The sections come together with Peterson’s reconsideration of Galileo himself, in light of all this background material on the various artistic traditions of which he was a product. What we have in Galileo’s Muse, then, is the surprising and extraordinary claim that it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. And, what’s more, Peterson presents a dramatic and convincing claim that the Oratione de Mathematicae Laudibus, a 1627 book attributed to Galileo’s young protégé Niccolo Aggiunti was actually written by Galileo himself, and should be read as confirmation of this “third” Galileo.

Mark Peterson spoke with us about Galileo’s Muse for an episode of the Harvard Press Podcast. You can listen here.

A New Perspective on Florence and Baghdad

We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.

The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.

Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:

The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.

As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”

There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.

So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”

Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.

The Image of the Black in Latin America

This spring PBS aired a four-part series from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called Black in Latin America. The series examines the influence of African descent on Latin America, and is the third part of what Gates calls a trilogy that mimics “the patterns of the triangle trade.” The trilogy began in 1999 with Wonders of the African World, and continued in 2004 with America Beyond the Color Line. The first series explored the relationship between Africa and the New World, the second reported on the lives of modern-day African Americans, and now Black in Latin America shows how the rich cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean are the products of Africa and Europe coming together. All four parts of Black in Latin America can now be watched online, courtesy of PBS. There is also a book, also titled Black in Latin America, written by Gates and forthcoming from NYU Press this summer.  

On top of all that, Gates is also the co-editor, with David Bindman, of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a series that we recently resurrected in partnership with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, which Gates directs. Last fall we published the first four books of what will ultimately be ten, and the fifth and sixth are due this fall. In the fifth book, which is actually Part 2 of Volume III, there is a chapter called “The South American Scene,” which illustrates much of the history covered by Gates in Black in Latin America.

The Image of the Black in Western Art documents representations of people of African descent throughout the history of Western art. Much of that representation begins with the slave trade. As Black in Latin America makes clear, the overwhelming majority of the African slaves brought to the new world were taken south of the United States. As Gates explained in an interview with PBS, of the 11.2 million Africans that are known to have survived the Middle Passage and landed in the New World, only 450,000 came to the United States. So, what Black in Latin America explores, and what The Image of the Black in Western Art documents, is this incredible history of the presence of people of African descent in South America and in the Caribbean.

In The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol III, Part 2, we see this, the first visual representation of an enslaved African in the Americas: 

Oh, The Pleasure Dairy

We publish a lot of books. It can be tough to keep them all in your head. Sometimes a book flies under the radar but then arrives with a wallop. Yours truly was just walloped by Dairy Queens. What a luscious book this became!

The book, by Meredith Martin, is everything you wanted to know about pleasure dairies but were afraid to ask. Or, rather, didn't know to ask.  Because, really, who’s heard of pleasure dairies? Not enough of us.

From Martin’s Introduction:

This book tells the story of an early modern building type that today has been largely forgotten: the pleasure dairy, or what is known in French as the laiterie d’agrément, or laiterie de propeté. Most of us are familiar with the legend of Marie-Antoinette dressing up as a milkmaid and, together with her aristocratic female friends, churning butter at her faux-rustic hamlet, or hameau, at Versailles. Some are also aware of the luxurious white marble dairy that her architect Richard Mique built for her as part of this pastoral enterprise in the mid-1780s. From the time of its creation, Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy has been an essential site in the development of her bad reputation, both as a thoughtless and extravagant queen and as a historical figure who violated the boundaries of her class and gender.

The Hameau de Versailles, in fact, has two dairies: the pleasure dairy and the functional preparation dairy, or laiterie de preparation. Marie-Antoinette’s servants used the preparation dairy to fabricate milk products that were then brought to the pleasure dairy to be admired and consumed by the queen and her guests. Though the two dairies resembled each other in exterior appearance and interior layout, the pleasure dairy’s furnishings were made of sumptuous white marble (rather than a plainer stone), and its interior stone walls were painted to resemble marble, complementing the trompe l’oeil coffered ceiling and rich crown moldings. The room was also outfitted with a lavish set of gilded porcelain dairy ware that was produced at Marie-Antoinette’s own porcelain manufactory in Paris and that imitated the basic stone and tin utensils used in the preparation dairy, including settling pans and milk jugs. The Hameau’s pleasure dairy constituted an elegant re-creation of a typical working dairy, one whose “work” centered less on production and more on consumption, royal symbolism, and aristocratic play. It provided Marie-Antoinette with a venue in which to enjoy the pleasures, and embrace the values, of rural life in a manner fit for a queen.

How can we begin to make sense of this curious building type and its historical and cultural significance? First, it is important to understand that the Hameau’s pleasure dairy was neither an isolated example nor the product of Marie-Antoinette’s frivolous imagination, as has been assumed. To the contrary, it was part of an established tradition of dairy construction in French royal and elite gardens that began in the mid-sixteenth century with Catherine de’Medici at the court of Fontainebleau.

New Edition of the World-Renowned Washington Haggadah

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. Among the countless editions that have been published, few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which was created in Germany in the 15th Century by the artist and scribe Joel ben Simeon. One of ten surviving Hebrew manuscripts that bear Joel ben Simeon’s signature, the Washington Haggadah resides in the Library of Congress, where it has long been considered a centerpiece of the Hebraic Section collections.

Though a beautiful work of art, the Washington Haggadah was, of course, intended to be used at the seder table, as indicated by wine stains on the parchment. So that this document can be both widely appreciated and used as intended, we have worked with the Library of Congress to produce a beautiful new full-color facsimile edition of the codex.

The image below, depicting an entire family balanced on the back of a donkey, is typical of the enchanting, sometimes-mysterious images that illuminate the pages of the Washington Haggadah.

A selection of additional images from the volume can be viewed online here.

In addition to its faithful, right-to-left reproduction of the original manuscript, our new edition includes introductions and commentary from the scholars David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. In their hands, the manuscript reveals the contours of an evolving Passover ritual; the nature of European Jewish life in the 15th century; and the practice of religious and secular art in the early modern era. This edition also includes a translation of the text, along with notes on the illustrations.

In celebration of the publication of this facsimile edition, the Library of Congress has lent the Washington Haggadah to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on display through June 26th within the context of the museum’s permanent medieval collection. Peggy Pearlstein, Head of the Hebraic Section of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division says of the loan: “Like the new facsimile edition itself, this unprecedented loan is a wonderful opportunity for us to share the crown jewel of the Library's Hebraic Section collections with a wider audience, and to make the public aware of the richness of the Library's holdings in this field.” Its presentation inaugurates a series of loans planned for the next several years, each of which will focus on a single, illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscript.

Weeping for Anna Karenina

This month we’re publishing Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, a playful and brilliant collection of Eco’s thoughts on his intersecting careers as theorist and fiction writer. In the excerpt below, Eco reflects on the power of fictional characters to invade our emotional lives, setting the stage for an ensuing semiotic argument for the existence of fictional characters as concrete objects.

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Weeping for Anna Karenina

In 1860, on the verge of sailing through the Mediterranean to follow Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, Alexandre Dumas père stopped in Marseille and visited the Château d’If, where his hero, Edmond Dantès, before becoming the Count of Monte Cristo, was imprisoned for fourteen years and was tutored in his cell by a fellow inmate, the abbé Faria. While Dumas was there, he discovered that visitors were regularly shown what was called the “real” cell of Monte Cristo, and that the guides constantly spoke of Dantès, Faria, and the other characters of the novel as if they had really existed. In contrast, the same guides never mentioned that the Château d’If had held as prisoners some important historical figures, such as Honoré Mirabeau.

Thus, Dumas comments in his memoirs: “It is the privilege of novelists to create characters who kill those of the historians. The reason is that historians evoke mere ghosts, while novelists create flesh-and-blood people.”

Once a friend of mine urged me to organize a symposium on the following subject: If we know that Anna Karenina is a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, why do we weep over her plight, or at any rate why are we deeply moved by her misfortunes?

There are probably many highly educated readers who do not shed tears over the fate of Scarlett O’Hara but are nevertheless shocked by the fate of Anna Karenina. Moreover, I have seen sophisticated intellectuals openly weep at the end of Cyrano de Bergerac—a fact that should not astonish anybody, because when a dramatic strategy aims at inducing the audience to shed tears, it makes them weep regardless of their cultural level. This is not an aesthetic problem: great works of art may not evoke an emotional response, whereas many bad films and dime novels succeed in doing so. And let’s remember that Madame Bovary, a character for whom many readers have wept, used to cry over the love stories she was reading.

I told my friend firmly that this phenomenon had neither ontological nor logical relevance, and could be of interest only to psychologists. We can identify with fictional characters and with their deeds because, according to a narrative agreement, we start living in the possible world of their story as if it were our own real world. But this does not occur only when we read fiction.

Many of us have sometimes thought of the possible death of a loved one and have been deeply affected, if not moved to tears, even though we knew that the event was imagined and not real. Such phenomena of identification and projection are absolutely normal and (I repeat) are a matter for psychologists. If there are optical illusions, in which we see a given form as bigger than another even though we know they are exactly the same size, why shouldn’t there be emotional illusions as well?