1 - The emotional economy
Summary
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand … In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the palm of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed in him, and his thoughts affrighted him; and the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.
(Daniel 5:1–6)Fear
When Belshazzar saw the writing on the wall he was afraid. We are provided with an account of the object of his fear: the hand that appears mysteriously at the feast and writes on the wall. We are also given an account of the occurrent states that constitute the king's response to this stimulus: the change in his countenance, the thoughts that entered his mind, the feeling of his joints loosening, and the smiting of his knees against each other. We are told less about why he responds to the object in these particular ways. This is hardly surprising, as biblical narrative is largely concerned with action rather than emotion, and gives the audience a free hand to fill in the psychology of the characters. So in this case we are left to speculate about what precipitated these responses in Belshazzar.
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- Information
- Art's EmotionsEthics, Expression and Aesthetic Experience, pp. 13 - 38Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011