The Recognitions - pg. 112

-Listen ... , he said. He'd withdrawn his hand on the table top automatically. -That's what it is, this arrogance, in this flamenco music this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it's what's so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that's so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it's a precision of suffering, he went on, abruptly working his hand in the air as though to shape it there, -the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework, ... in a pattern that doesn't pretend to any other level but it's own, do you know what I mean? He barely glanced at her to see if she did.
-It's the privacy, the exquisite sense of privacy about it, he said speaking more rapidly, -it's the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don't have, don't dare have, that's what makes it arrogant. That what sentimentalizing invades and corrupts, that's what we've lost everywhere, especially here where they make every possible assault on your feelings and privacy. These things have their own patterns, suffering and violence, and that's ... the sense of violence within its own pattern, the pattern that belongs to violence like the bullfight, that's why the bullfight is art, because it respects its own pattern ...