Art.

THESE days I often reflect upon Schopenhauer’s notion that the main purpose of this life is to distract via, or absorb ourselves into, Art; be it of paint, sound, light, or written word. His view was that the true reality of existence is so brutal and primordial, as shown in the terrible struggles of the animal kingdom, or in the awful violence of a volcano, a wildfire, or an hurricane, that the best we can do in this short and painful life is to try and forget ourselves in the wondrous oddity of art’s delight. For we are always in peril of some injury or disease, hiding ourselves from threats and shielding our hopes from exterior danger, and we know not the destinies which are ours except that we must die one day as we endeavour to live.

   Almost all human leisure outside of sport can be rationalised as art; books, films, music, and games, are all but forms of art, that remarkable enterprise of distracting the human passions. Often to the point of frustration, exaltation, worry, and gladness, these arts can turn life into an adventure from an easy chair, and suffuse a chasm of inertia with meaning. Yet it is all only so much fiction, naturally, say they. ‘Did Cain exist?’ certainly he existed as soon as he was conceived, in one mind and consequently a billion, more potently real as an embodiment of wickedness and an example of ill than the thousands we daily pass on the street and detect in steps, in breaths, in movements, and speech, but never know by name or history at all, to meet but once and never more. Such everyday encounters are so many deaths, so many fatal tales of once and nought again. Ten thousand years from now perhaps almost everyone alive to-day will be totally forgotten. What is existence? He who reproves God, let him answer it.

   Now I should ask of Schopenhauer, if he lived now, in all his pessimism whether or not art itself tells something fundamental about reality, and whether or no this fundamental truth was not in its nature brutal, violent, and horrible. It may be that this good process of detection through art is itself an insight deeper and more telling than the ruthless cynicism of egoistic logic tales. There must be a reason why I so easily weary and take against cocksure atheist dismissals, and why I so readily indulge the art of a prayer in church. It is because I see short feeling and thought in the one and deep love in the other, at least intention to approach the profound things in the latter, a tincture of the fuller realm, the more complete picture, not merely a portion of all that is dreary and woeful in flesh.

   Good religion is this sympathy with art, through music, through visions of light in windows, murals, paintings, sculpture, vaulted ceiling, and reaching spire, and in meaning of legend, history, verse, and parable. To teach morals and understanding through written example and worship of the beating essence of life. This, rendered everlasting in the conception of the universe through the thought of God, is the fullest imbibement of art; it is a transformative thing, were it false it should never have had such power, beyond ideas, beyond life