"During the thirties there were very few people, whether artists or not, who could remain
uninvolved, either on a direct personal level or indirectly as human beings of
conscience. It seemed that only the morally crippled or the socially irresponsible
could fail to react to the obvious effect that vast, complicated, and impersonal social
forces were having on the substance of of so many human lives.
For artists, especially, those years inevitably brought a multitude of experiences which were thrown up by the turmoil of the surrounding situation. Without consciously looking or listening, our eyes and ears were filled with sights and sounds that accumulated day by day, were measured, sorted, rearranged, and stitched together to achieve a new significance that finally demanded some release in our work
This book proved to be the longest of all, not only because of its more complicated
story but because I was anxious to make as explicit a statement as possible. To
accomplish that I broke down the action into many small steps, using several small
blocks to bring the reader in close to a character so that facial expression would
register mmore effectively the emotional response of that character to what was
happening, thereby involving the reader's own emotions more completely.
The book was published under the title of Vertigo, which was meant to suggest that the illogic of what was happenning all around us in the thirties was enough to set the mind spinning through space and the emotions hurtling from great hope to the depths of despair."
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