My Sophomoric Commonplace

More Meditations on the Goal of Art (Its Side-Effects)

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

This is a quotation from one of my favorite poets and critics—T.S. Eliot. I came across this passage while using that crazy new stumbleupon application on firefox (one of the coolest tools on the internet today). But anyway, it got me to thinking (and that’s always a dangerous thing for the blank page, or text window, i guess). It all sounds so beautiful, but what does it mean for an artist to go through “a continual extinction of personality”? I journaled my meditation:

I find it hard to believe that humans don’t have some inner capacity that connects them to our larger conceptions of art. There are some, a very select few, who make it into the collective consciousness as what we call artists. But they’re all doing the same thing, getting away with whatever they can in order to represent a reality we all know somewhere. There are a few more who try until their final breaths to get there. They don’t. But there are even more (exponentially more) whose lives unconsciously subscribe to the collective conscience’s notion of art. So now I am under the suspicion (my evidence not yet substantialized) (my claims not yet proven) (or even fully thought-through) that those people—the ones who can converse, who chuckle, who cry and bawl, without the slightest worry about their impact on the world are people who live art. The ones who are free to live without constantly monitoring the firings of their synapses are living art. And artists, if their job is about emulating nature (what is natural), must somehow make and live this living art. To do this, they can have no personality of their own, for they are forced to take on the personality of their subject (humanity, nature, the vast etc.).

But I realize now that it is not just artists who must blur the lines of their relationships with people. Anyone concerned with humanity in general, must consider all humans (even the ones they are close to) in somewhat the same fashion. They must either feel the deepest empathy for all the souls they come across (we call this philanthropy), or they must feel the sincerest indifference, maybe even hatred, for all the souls they face (we call this misanthropy). Either way, the lines of human relationships are blurred. With that, I must add this to My Sophomoric Commonplace; it’s a quotation from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth:

“The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.”