Life and art

In the Guardian the other day I read about Anthony Matthews aged 20 a trooper in the Light Dragoons who survived a grenade hit. He was quoted as saying that the experience had been ‘like a scene from Saving Private Ryan‘. I suppose this is a more heightened illustration taken from a more extremely lived life of what for any of the rest of us we might mean when we say that a sunset is just like a painting by Turner. It is such artifices that make the shoreline from which we judge what we take to be the motions of the real world.