That We May Live
From Sherwood Anderson to his son:
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Any cleanness I have in my own life is due to my feeling for words.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces.
There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.
You won't arrive. It is an endless search.
"The point of being an artist is that you may live.”
I’ve never heard it said better.
We are thrust into this world without our consent—every one of us—and without any knowledge of why we have come. That knowledge must be gathered, moment by moment, day by day, year by year.
But we come into this world—again, every one of us—with such a fierce need to be! We are life calling to itself, life honoring itself, life as the deepest expression of the sacred.
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, astrophysicist of the early 20th century, said, “The universe is less like a thing than it is like a thought.” And we are all thoughts. Thoughts in the mind of God if we frame our sense of the sacred with that word. Thoughts in the mind of the Universe if that language suits better.
What does any of this have to do with writing, the topic I keep circling around? Let me return to Sherwood Anderson: “The object of art is . . . to save yourself.” And I don’t mean, and I’m certain he didn’t mean, to buy yourself a ticket to eternal bliss. Because Anderson goes on to say, “The thing, of course, is to make yourself alive.”
And that’s it. That’s the secret. We are given these lives, these precious lives, and what better celebration of the gift we each hold so dear can there be than art . . . in any form?
Cooking is an art for me, though a minor one. I please myself and my family and friends but could never stand up to the most modestly trained chef. But that doesn’t matter. Standing at my kitchen counter chopping onions pleases me. It affirms the onionness of onions, the sustaining value of and the fragrant pleasure of food, and the long-practiced wisdom of my own hands.
Writing this blog pleases me, though I send it out with no expectation of reward.
Writing a book and having an editor choose it and seeing it go out into the world pleases me, of course. And I can do it because I, like Anderson, wrote constantly for many, many years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
Anything we do with affection, with passion, with pleasure in the doing is art.
“The point of being an artist is that you may live.”
The point of being alive is to know we are so, to honor our own aliveness, to rejoice in each waking, each rising, each sacred breath.
There is no place to arrive. Anderson was right, the search is endless.
But the search itself—and the art that grows out of it—is so, so sweet.