Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight, does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring...
This is from a book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, and I will probably be mentioning it a lot in the near future. Besides being hands-down the best book I've ever read, there are so many thoughts and ideas to take away from it. It continues to teach long after the last page was turned. I thought this was the perfect passage to start things off as it introduces the very reason I choose art - and I mean all kinds of art - as my career choice and lifelong path. I'm going into a political science major, but all for the sake of reporting on it using words that can influence, sentences that are crafted in a way that hits all the right buttons. That's art. Why is it that we are happy to read something really good, and we marvel at the writer's talent for so effortlessly lightening our mood?
...We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is art. When we gaze at a still life, when - even though we did not pursue it - we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. In this scene before our eyes - silent, without life or motion - a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed - pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.
For art is emotion without desire.
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