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Siegfried Kracauer is the sort of man who can’t say “It’s a lovely day” without first establishing that it is a day, that the term “day” is meaningless without the dialectical concept of “night”, that both these terms have no meaning unless there is a world in which day and night alternate, and so forth. By the time he has established an epistemological system to support his right to observe that it’s a lovely day, our day has been spoiled
(Kael 1965:269)