What Rises from the Ruins: Katherine Anne Porter on the Power of the Artist and the Function of Art in Human Life

“We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment.”

When the dust of the centuries settles, what is left of every civilization are not its dogmas and its ideologies, not its reasons for going to war, but its arts — those emblems of our search for meaning, reaching for a reality realer than fact, deeper than doctrine; those records of our reckoning with what the world is and what it can be; those supreme revelations of who and what we are. Rebecca West understood this whe...