ericgerlach79
Gerlach is German and rhymes with bear-lock. I was born and raised in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco, moved to Berkeley for college and grad school, with an MA in History of Religion from the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley, and now teach Philosophy and the history of human thought at Berkeley City College. I have taught Intro Philosophy, Ethics, Logic, Asian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Modern European Philosophy and Social & Political Philosophy there for the past several years, and it has been a joy.
Thought Itself 
July 8, 2016 at 8:59 pm
It reminds me of end of the movie Citizen Kane, capturing Charles Kane’s breakdown with the famous mirror scene where the repetition of the image of him walking past ornately framed parallel mirrors for an infinity effect enhance his loneliness and isolation after Susan Alexander (suggestive of William Randolph Hearst’s consort Marion Davies) leaves him.
In a way this image of the Mona Lisa also enhance our sense of loneliness and isolation by being so far removed from the emotion that Leonardo Da Vinci felt while painting the Mona Lisa. The picture is a vain attempt to make an individualistic contribution to art by repackaging it. What we are left with is an image of reality that is 3 times removed from the original scene with less of the painting’s subtle modeling of forms, the atmospheric illusionism and emotive impact that the painter had with his subject.