Art

Of course, not all art has to rock your world and make you a different person, not in a big way necessarily--but I would agree it ought to have a heartbeat, and not be just lines or dabs of color on a surface.

-Daniel Pinkwater, Bushman Lives!, 228-229.

Cathedrals

...It is not the purpose of cathedrals simply to make people feel small (there is no virtue in feeling small) but rather to help people understand that they are located within the vast and orderly architecture of creation. We are indeed small, but a small part of something glorious, in which we can participate, find out place, find our purpose. Cathedrals are celebrations of all that God has made, and they embody in their stone and glass the history of God's dealings with his world and people made in his image.

 -Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 51.

How to Read

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn't help himself. To him it wasn't a means to a lecture of article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn't this what the work of art demands of us?...So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!

-Randall Jarrell, quoted by Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 15-16.

We Make Because We are Made

...To quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”...

“Dear Sir,” I said—“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misued). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

...Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

-J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkein Miscellany, 127.

Cheese and Crackers

The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits [crackers]. Biscuits – to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits – to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

-G. K. Chesterton, "Cheese"

Optimistic About Nothing

However, American culture is by nature more upbeat, more optimistic than European culture, more about opportunity than about our lost philosophical bearings, so it tends to think differently about our lost center. It is naturally more hopeful. It therefore stares not so much at the void as at the prospect of a Caribbean vacation, at the high-end catalogs, the upward move, and the new Lexus. Europeans might still see themselves in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Americans are more inclined to while away the time by watching something distracting or amusing. Maybe Seinfeld. This brilliantly acted television show was, by its own reckoning, a show about nothing. Beckett's world, too, was a world in which Nothing reigned. Here are two streets that end up at the same destination, one at a highbrow level and the other at, well, a lowbrow level. But Beckett's was nastier.

-David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, 110.

Leaf by Niggle

He was a painter by nature. In a minor way, of course; still, a Leaf by Niggle has a charm of its own. He took a great deal of pains with leaves, just for their own sake.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, Leaf ny Niggle

Not Enough

"'Jim Morrison's Grave' asks the age-old question: Does artistry justify being a weasel?...Morrison left the world some intriguing music. As far as I'm concerned, that's not enough." -Steve Taylor