The quoted segment explores the labyrinthine, puzzle-like nature of art, – whether poetry or theater, or music, or perhaps of painting or of sculpture.

Imagine yourself in a gallery, or in an artist’s studio and you are surrounded by an array of paintings, or perhaps by sculpture. Each work is a portal into the creator’s world, a disclosure of the world-making of the artist. How infinitely interesting that which your eye discloses, how intimate, personal, and dare I say, common…

Each of us has in common with the artist, the blush of shame attending the concealing of our secret(s) from others, even as the work interprets the secret to ourselves…

Happy Thanksgiving to you, dear reader!

Nothing is dreaded more by
artists, poets, and writers
than the eye

which sees through their little deceptions
and subsequently notices
how often they have stopped
at the boundary where the paths branch off
either to innocent delight in themselves
or to the straining after effect;
the eye

which checks them
when they try to sell little things dear,
or when they try to exalt and adorn
without being exalted themselves;
the eye

which,
despite all the artifices of their art,
sees the thought as it first presented itself to them,
perhaps as a charming vision of light,
perhaps also, however,
as a theft from the whole world,
or as an
everyday conception which
they had to expand, contract, color,
wrap up, and spice,
in order to make something out of it,
instead of the thought
making something out of them.

—Oh, this eye,

which sees in your work
all your restlessness, inquisitiveness,
and covetousness, your imitation and exaggeration
(which is only envious imitation)
which knows
both your blush of shame
and your skill
in concealing it from others
and interpreting it to
yourselves!

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 223