Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

Perhaps God shouldn’t conceive of creation as an artwork, the next time around; then he will do a better job with the qualities of fairness and intimacy in our living. But is that even possible—for an artist to shape their impulse into a form which is not, in the end, an art form?

She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

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?

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

With a few people in one’s life, too much happens emotionally—more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. Mira felt this way about Annie. It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one—and isn’t that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life?

She knew that one day death would find her, the same way it had found him—but that this was nothing to fear, or to feel too sad about, for there would always be something vaster that would hold you in its arms, something vaster even than a loving daughter. You would be held in the universe’s arms, but you would also be its arms.

She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed itself into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.

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.

I would like to come back after my death and see— What? Whether my works were kept by humanity. Whether my art is being exhibited fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years from now. So you want to return to earth to google yourself? Yes. Immortality means googling yourself forever.

Every human who ever lived is part of this draft which is now ending, so everyone who ever lived should be assembled when the curtain comes down.