Clive James, describing the “lust for discovery [that is] a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never [have] to fear rejection.” James’ point is elsewhere, and I don’t wish to linger on the notion of art as an escape except to note that if it is, it is not necessarily a cowardly one.
Milan Kundera once defended Igor Stravinsky against critics who, romantics and sentimentalists that they were, felt he suffered from a “poverty of heart.” He didn’t emote enough for them, and as music seemed to serve these critics as a mirror in which to observe (and parade) their own feelings he was thus a formalist and a failure.
Kundera mounts a convincing counter-argument before additionally noting that Stravinsky’s critics themselves didn’t “have heart enough to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music,” to see that devotion to art and to form and to beauty is a sort of love in itself, one perhaps preferable for a man so displaced in reality as Stravinsky. (Stravinsky lived in exile, and -Kundera claims- found his home in music’s historical development).
If your country is taken over by savage ideologues and your woman runs off with your friend, taking the dog, you can do worse than turning yourself over to art, which is never insincere in its desire to share something -life, experience, perception, form- with you.
