The best new movies carry intimations of permanence along with their novelty and very quickly start to seem as if they had been around all along.
— A. O. Scott, “Screen Memories” in last week’s Times Magazine
That odd feeling you get when you first run into great artworks — they “very quickly start to seem as if they have been around all along” — strikes me as a pretty good definition of success in any art form, not just movies but novels, pop songs, or any other. Once you have met them, it immediately becomes hard to imagine the world without them. There ought to be a word for this feeling, some German train-wreck of a word like schadenfreude.