My Years With Proust - Day 699

The greatness, on the one hand, of true art, of the art which M. de Norpois would have called a dilettante's pastime, lay, I had come to see, elsewhere: we have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an even greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life.  Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated - the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived - is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist.  But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it.  And therefore their past is like a photographic dark-room encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them.  But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people - for style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual.  Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon.  Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 931-932

"Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon."

Recently I suggested on Twitter that anyone with aspirations should be forced to read Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past.  Now, I didn't go as far as the esteemed Sanford Zale, who, after I pestered him into reading In Cold Blood (after we traveled together to Holcomb, Kansas), stated that every American, if at gun point, should be forced to read the Capote classic work.  In much the same way anyone who ever questions what art means, what it can do, should read this moving passage from Proust.  Dewey proposed that art was as a language that could be studied to connect to other cultures, which is an idea which reflects the idea in the sentence I culled out above.  Not only can art connect us to others, but without it we are left alone.  I think of our increasingly intellectually stunted and art-starved students, and how they sit before every class staring at their phones trying desperately to connect with someone else, even on the most transient, surface level - and how when I drag them over to the Fleming Museum in my Aesthetic Expressions class so many of them tell me that they've never stepped foot in a museum before.  Not only is it leaving them intellectually and culturally emaciated, but it is emotionally deaf and mute.  I especially like his last line in this passage: "Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."  Just as dead stars can continue to shine lights for millennia, the truly great artists can make connections as real and vibrant as when they first wrote or painted centuries ago.