"We are not transparent to ourselves. We have institutions, suspicious, hunches, vague musings and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don't really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience as half-formed and giving them clear expression: what it was often thought, but ne'er so well expressed'. In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly."                        ALAIN DE BOTTON / JOHN ARMSTRONG,           (Art as Therapy", Phaidon, New York/London, 2013)