I sometimes feel I am in a daily struggle not to become a shallower version of
myself. The first driver of shallowization is technology, the way it shrinks
attention span, fills the day with tempting distractions. The second driver is
the politicization of everything. Like a lot of people, I spend too much of my
time enmeshed in politics — the predictable partisan outrages, the campaign
horse race analysis, the Trump scandal du jour.
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So, I
am trying to take countermeasures. I flee to the arts.
I am
looking for those experiences we all had as a kid: becoming so enveloped by an
adventure story that you refuse to put it down to go have dinner; getting so
exuberantly swept up in some piece of music that you feel primeval passions
thumping within you; encountering a painting so beautiful it feels like you
have walked right into its alternative world.
The
normal thing to say about such experiences is that you have lost yourself in a
book or song — lost track of space and time. But it is more accurate to say
that a piece of art has quieted the self-conscious ego voice that is normally
yapping away within. A piece of art has served as a portal to a deeper realm of
the mind. It has opened up that hidden, semiconscious kingdom within us from
which emotions emerge, where our moral sentiments are found — those instant,
esthetic-like reactions that cause us to feel disgust in the presence of
cruelty and admiration in the presence of generosity.
A piece of art has served as a portal to a deeper realm of the mind. It has opened up that hidden, semiconscious kingdom within us from which emotions emerge, where our moral sentiments are found — those instant, esthetic-like reactions that cause us to feel disgust in the presence of cruelty and admiration in the presence of generosity.
The
arts work on us at that deep level, the level that really matters. You give me
somebody who disagrees with me on every issue, but who has a
good heart — who has the ability to sympathize with others, participate in
their woes, longings and dreams — well, I want to stay with that person all
day. You give me a person who agrees with me on every
particular, but who has a cold, resentful heart — well, I want nothing to do
with him or her.
Artists
generally do not set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect
expression of their experience. But their art has the potential to humanize the
beholder. How does it do this?
First,
beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and
prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your
opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and
open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind
of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient,
just and humble way. In “The Sovereignty of Good,” novelist and philosopher
Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish
consciousness and join the world as it really is.”
When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you have not learned a new fact, but you have had a new experience.
Second,
artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece
of sculpture, you have not learned a new fact, but you have had a new
experience. British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “The listener to Mozart’s
Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and
creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of
childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which
those days of joy contain.”
These
experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how
to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to
share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.
Third,
art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person
who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” is a
political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it does
not represent, documentarylike, an exact scene in that war. It goes deeper to
give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering,
and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it.
Of
course “Invisible Man” is a political novel about racial injustice, but as
Ralph Ellison later wrote, he was trying to write not just a novel of racial
protest, but also a “dramatic study in comparative humanity which I felt any
worthwhile novel should be.”
But we can still stage our mini-rebellions, kick our political addictions from time to time, and enjoy the free play of mind, the undogmatic spirit and the heightened and adrenalized states of awareness that the best art still provides.
I haul
myself off to museums and such with the fear that in a political and
technological age, the arts have become less central to public life, that we do
not seem to debate novels and artistic breakthroughs the way people did in
other times, that the artistic and literary worlds have themselves become
stultified by insular groupthink, and this has contributed to the
dehumanization of American culture.
But we
can still stage our mini-rebellions, kick our political addictions from time to
time, and enjoy the free play of mind, the undogmatic spirit and the heightened
and adrenalized states of awareness that the best art still provides.
Earlier
this year I visited the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney a couple of times,
and I got to see New York through that man’s eyes — the spare rooms on side
streets, and the isolated people inside. I forget most of what I read, but
those images stay vivid in the mind.
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