First Sentence

"The artists eye, as Thomas Mann has said, has a mythical slant upon life; therefore, the mythological realm-the world of the gods and demons, the carnival of their masks and the curious game of "as if" in which the festival of the lived myth abrogates all the laws of time, letting the dead swim back to life, and the "once upon a time" become the very present-we must approach and first regard with the artist's eye."