Too hot and you burn up, too cold and you freeze.

The couple stood there at the painting and cooed each other. "Look at the beautiful strokes," they said. "The technique, and how he pulls it all together." And they were right. It was a technical masterpiece, and beautifully done. The strokes boldly created the mountains that were as indefinite yet significant as the myths that surrounded them, and decades ago the artist's brush forcefully propelled mist over those mountains. The mountains we watched in this sterilized museum. The couple was so wrong. I wanted to scream. "You fools!" The technical skill is simply the surface of art. How could they know? They didn't have the context. The sage in the work was gone. He had furled himself up--or been furled up--and a faceless monstrosity took his place. Perhaps it was for the better, as there was no longer any path for him. The village was isolated and alone. There were only insurmountable cliffs on all sides, stained with the rust and pollution of the mechanization that suffocates humanity. A soul was dieing in that painting. It was screaming out in the only way it could before it, too, was furled up and forgotten.

"The contrast in the colors are amazing," they said over that eternally bloody, dieing carcass. Then they moved on to the next work of art in that sterile museum, flirting and cooing.