"When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the grasp of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to elude me. Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves. In a work such as Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one discovers soonest are also those of which one tires most quickly, and for the same reason, no doubt - namely, that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first impression s have receded, there remains for our enjoyment some passage whose structure, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made it indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which was had passed every day without knowing it, which had held itself in reserve for us, which by the sheer power of its beauty had become invisible and remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But we shall also relinquish it last. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 571-572
Once again I believe that Proust is spot on in his proposal that the "great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves." Two works that immediately jump to mind, and which I will not expand on here because I've held forth at length on them in the past, are Paul Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching and Neil Young's album Tonight's the Night (and here's a link to the gloriously out of tune but brilliantly focused Tired Eyes). First off, neither artist ever gave a tinker's damn whether you got it or not, which means they always created for themselves alone. More importantly, both of these works contain worlds within worlds and you needed context and analysis and determination to plunge the depths necessary to appreciate them. What you're seeing or hearing, while in itself captivating, is a mere flickering shadow of a much more profound and beautiful internal truth. If these artistic visions were easy to access they wouldn't be worth knowing.
In addition, Proust suggests that since he initially never "possessed it in its entirety" Vinteuil's sonata "was like life itself." Often the folks that we are drawn to most easily and naturally are also the ones we tire of most quickly, and the ones that we initially find prickly or difficult are the ones who we eventually love the most and who continue to fascinate us over the years. This relates to my last post where I had to take ownership of the fact that all too often in the past I've been guilty of not giving people the initial time and attention that they needed - for any number of reasons - and thus I might not have gotten beyond the surface (while at the same time devoting a lot of time and effort to tackling difficult and seemingly inaccessible works of art [said the man reading and commenting on Remembrance of Things Past]). Having said that, many of my closest friends are complex, if not peculiar, characters that became dear to me because I put in the work to get beneath the surface (and I'll show them the respect of not naming them publicly, although you know who you are). I suspect what the great works of arts and my great friends have in common is a rich internal universe, and a general disdain for whether anyone figures it out or not.
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