7.03.2010

meaning of life

I've been reading a lot of books from the library and also my own that have been sitting around waiting for me.
Including Fernando Pessoa, who is a Portuguese poet that was mostly published posthumously. I am reading The Book of Disquiet.

This is from there:

27
Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if we were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.
What moves lives. What is said endures. There is nothing in life that's less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it's a nice day. But to say it's a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It's up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

End of quote.

I think it applies to all art work.

1 comment:

  1. I especially like the part about taking away it's terror. i want to read this.

    ReplyDelete