But when Olivier is no longer captured on film but manufactured on the computer, perhaps in multiple versions, we lose the very thing that art was supposedly preserving: our point of contact with the irreplaceable, finite person.
In November 1939 Adolf Hitler said: "I must in all modesty describe my own person: irreplaceable".
Your local, irreplaceable, embedded HR person may know how to move forms around, but his or her real value is in solving problems involving actual people.
One of the most moving evocations of the irreplaceable quiddity of a person is Elisabeth Subrin's "Fancy," which will be shown in the program "Brought to Light" tomorrow and Sunday.
And while I argued last week for the irreplaceable value of in-person, up-close classes, if each student enrolled in just one tech-enabled class each semester, instructional costs could be dramatically reduced and the funds saved could both lower tuition and be partly redeployed to areas of the curriculum where student demand was going unmet.
"God made every person unique and irreplaceable as His beloved images in this world," the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, preached this past winter.
"Steven is a player and a person who is irreplaceable in terms of what he has given over his time here.
"This is a massive, irreplaceable loss and we want the person responsible for this brought to justice".
By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: "loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another" (1987, p. 14).
