Archives for July 21, 2020

From 2006:

Art doesn’t have to be true to life to be good, but when a work of art is true to your life, it strikes a special chord. On occasion music has this effect on me: I can think of any number of pieces that appear to embody my feelings about the world so precisely that I feel as though I might have written them. Much of Aaron Copland’s music has that effect on me, as does the streetlights-at-dusk melancholy of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus’ elegy for Lester Young.

My guess is that most people are more likely to respond in this way to works of art that make use of words, and in particular to movies, which at their best are capable of creating an impression of reality so total as to be overwhelming. For my part, though, I haven’t seen many movies that seemed true in any significant way to my personal experience. Only three spring to mind…

“That is why education seems, to me, so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure—if you like, for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative. You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal. All the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When the cow has finished eating, she chews the cud. When she has finished chewing, she sleeps. When she has finished sleeping, she eats again. She is a machine for turning grass into calves and milk—in other words, for producing more cows. The lion cannot stop hunting nor the beaver building dams nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb, He saved the world from infinite boredom for, if they could speak, they would, all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.”

C.S. Lewis, “Our English Syllabus” (courtesy of Richard Zuelch)