Art

I remember some artists who said this world isn't worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain.

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

Usually the work of several generations is needed to develop that formal system which later is called the style of the art, from its simple beginning to the wealth of elaborate forms... The interest of the artist is concentrated on this crystallization, where the material... takes, through his action, the various forms that are initiated by the first formal concepts of this style. After completion the interest must fade again, because... "interest" means... to be with... to take part in a process of life... [H]ow far the formal rules of style represent that reality of life which is meant by the art cannot be decided from the formal rules.