...the experience of art yields a view of human reality as something networked, crisscrossed with ties and bonds, quite at odds with the individuated world we take to be real: our private body and mind as the fixed enclosure where we think we live as individuals...Through literature, other lives enter ours as richly and mysteriously as air enters our lungs. Through art we access realms of experience that are life-enhancing...
There is a startling economy at work here, a two-way street, inasmuch as the books we read flow inward into us, add to our stock, enrich our perceptions, stir our inmost feelings; yet art and literture also, quite wonderfully, draw us out, hook us up (imaginatively, emotionally, neurally) into other curcuits, other lives, other times.
Life and love are precious because death is real.
At its most transcendent, art simply remakes the world, reshuffles that tired deck, stuns us with a larger apprehension of human affairs and our place within them, for we see how tentacular and linked the world really is, how arterial art's pathways truly are.
