Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

This is the moment we are living in—the moment of God standing back.

Who knows how long it has been going on for? Since the beginning of time, no doubt. But how long is that? And for how much longer will it continue? You’d think it would only last a moment, this delay of God standing back, before stepping forward again to finish the canvas, but it appears to be going on forever. But who knows how long or short this world of ours seems from the vanishing point of eternity?

People born from the bird egg are interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning. They look at nature from on high, in an abstracted way, and consider the world as if from a distance. These people are like birds soaring—flighty, fragile and strong.

People born from a fish egg appear in a flotation of jelly, and this jelly contains hundreds of thousands of eggs, where the most important thing is not any individual egg, but the condition of the many.

For the fish, it’s less any one individual egg that concerns them than that eggs are laid in the best conditions, where the temperature is most right, and the curren...

For fish, it’s the collective conditions that count. A person hatched from a fish egg is concerned with fairness and justice here on earth: on humanity getting the temperature right for the...

the person hatched from the egg of a bear clutches one special person close, as cl...

A person born from a bear egg is like a child holding on to their very best doll. Bears do not have a pragmatic way of thinking, in which their favourites can be sacrificed for some higher end. They are deeply consumed with their own. Bears claim a few people to love and protect, and feel untro...

People born from these three different eggs will never completely understand each other. They will always think that those born from a different egg have their priorities all wrong. But fish, birds ...

God needs creation critiqued by all three.

But here on earth, it is hard to believe it: fish find the concerns of the birds superficial, while birds are made impatient by the critiques of the fish. Nothing makes a person feel like their life’s work—or their self—is less seen than when it’s being judged by someone from a different egg. Yet birds should be grateful that someone is making the structural critique, so they don’t have to. And fish should be grateful that someone is making the aesthetic critique, so they can focus on the structural one.

How their petals and leaves make each passerby smile, that someone loves beauty and cares.

Her flowers make us think of the flowers in the soul of the person who put them there. It is the flowers in the soul of the person who put them there that make us happy and enliven our hearts.

The beauty of the flowers is a clue to the beauty of a human heart. They are a ke...

It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.

But being unlikeable wasn’t the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

art is supposed to give us the opposite feeling—that human endeavour has wings! A painting should make a person take flight spiritually, but a painting like this one has no wings, so we are given the feeling that wings are not even a thing.

What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence—for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?

Happiness was not meant to be ours. The love we imagined would never be ours. Work that could occupy our hearts and minds forever—this also was not meant to be ours. We would never make the money we hoped we would make. Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence. People were finally beginning to catch on. Our rage made perfect sense.

At least God had given the sunrise—to those of us who lived on a cliff.

At least he had given us a bit of love—if not enough to see us through to...

Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions. On good days, we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, a...

We once believed that two thousand years ago was long in the past, but then we realized it was actually quite recent—just thirty generations before us.

Pretending can get you part of the way, but it never gets you far enough.

We were angry all the time. We were envious all the time. We were relieved that we were being looked at by people who were just as angry, and just as envious, as we were.

Yet none of the books which were twenty years old were the least bit relevant anymore.

For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul.

Seeing Annie for the first time, something in Mira recognized her. It was like their relationship already existed. It wasn’t this way with most other people. It was Annie’s apparent pre-existence, which seemed impossible to explain, which distinguished her from the rest.

And it was strange for Mira to think that, for other people, Annie was just someone passing on the street, that she was nothing at all.

But in the next draft of existence, they will not understand this; how one person’s beautiful face could pull another person deep into their greatest sorrow.

Artists manifested themselves in art, not the world, so humans could encounter them there, forever.

People could return to books at any time and find them right there, those burning souls, their words as bright as the day they were written.

this must be happening all over the world, spirits entering other bodies, when a person dies.

there is always the possibility for a second draft in a human life, for life is always revolving, exiting a dying thing and mixing with the living. There is always the chance to live newly, to be born into a second life, for the spirit and you.

There is no peace as complete as to die. It is the end of your story and the end of you.

real…

Being alive is a problem that cannot be solved with living.

But no danger comes to the one who is dead. Their problems with everyone are through.

My basic premise is that in life, you live forever, because as soon as you die, you don’t realize you’re dead, so you’re kind of always alive, so the thing is, you shouldn’t worry about yourself.

You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas, and everything. What is lovable is not humans, but life.

And life will always be here? Yes, there are cycles, and if the earth gets sick, it will get well again, in maybe a million or two billion years. It will do what it needs to, because it is self-correcting in the fullness of time. So the humans evolved, and they evolved as killing creatures in so many ways, willing to torture, and self-involved.

Did you hold someone’s hand and tell them, I love you, even if you’d only just met?

Were we the lucky ones, to have been chosen to live in this terrible time—to have been chosen to live in this heartbreaking time—as any moment in human civilization will break your heart, but none more so than the end?

How lonely it was at the end of the world, not to have all the people who lived before us, with us here to share it.

We wanted them to return to this moment. We understood why, in apocalyptic tales, the bones of the dead rolled over the face of the earth, and everyone who ever lived was gathered in one place. Simply because the living wants the company of the dead. We want our ancestors to help us. We are scared. We want their company, and we want them to see it, as a dying father wants his loved ones close, gathered near the foot of his bed. So we wish for everyone who ever lived to be here with us, as the world we were all part of finally comes to an end. We feel they have the right to see it, to be here for the ...

They strip us of whatever they need to in order to see us more clearly.

In the moment of being stripped, a person becomes more clear to themselves. We can see our defects and limitations in a way we never could before. There is a new orientation to life and the self when the eyes of the gods are upon you.

The few moments of real presence you have ever felt in your life might mean that a god was inside someone near you, using them to see you. The few moments of real insight we’ve ever had about another might indicate that a god was inside us at that moment, using us to see them.

The week that Mira was being stripped of her father, she felt the gods inside him, watching her. That is when she saw herself truly: that she had loved art and books more than she had loved her own father. The gods took note of this, then they fled.

Mira knew that humans made art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.

Did a spirit which once lived in a body contain something that, even if it was split into a thousand pieces and separated for a hundred years, if those pieces came close in separate bodies, could draw those bodies near?