Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“To harmonize the whole is the task of art,” the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote in contemplating the spiritual element in art and the three responsibilities of artists. “The aim of art is insight, understanding of the essential life of feeling,” philosopher Susanne Langer asserted a generation later in her trailblazing treatise on the purpose of art. But even more nebulous and nuanced than the question of why we make art is the question of what art — great art — is.
“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts,” Kafka offered.Around the same time, across two European borders, the Nobel-winning French writer André Gide (November 22, 1869–February 19, 1951) — another titan of literature with a harmonic mind and uncommon insight into the life of feeling — was pondering the same question. His meditations survive in The Journals of André Gide (public library) — the most cherished of young Susan Sontag’s favorite books, and the source of Gide’s enduring wisdom on growing happier as we grow older, the paradox of originality, the vital balance of freedom and restraint, and what it really means to be yourself.
Three decades before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of…
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