Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

But doesn’t it all work out in the end, no matter which face you got? Yes, people with ugly faces can lead beautiful lives, and people with beautiful faces can lead ugly ones, and a beautiful face can draw you right down deep into the world’s greatest ugliness. 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.

But there was no asking anyone on earth, for we haven’t been created to know it.

She suddenly understood how much he had needed that, and now she understood its value, and how lonely it would have been for him not to have had it enough, and now it was all she wanted too, and they would never have it again.

Control your mind, she said to herself, so she wouldn’t go down the deepest path of recrimination and despair. What were the words that came into her mind, as she lay with him in the darkness of his final days? For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

seemed to her the week her father was dying that nothing mattered but art and literature. That while people passed away, the soul of a great artist would stay; that what they made would never die, so they were the ones we could hold close forever. Art would never leave us like a father dying. In a way, it would always remain. 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. How Mira loved artists!

Now walking outside, her hands quake, and her heart quivers and quakes, and there is a quivering and quaking in her chest and heart, from the whole world breathing on her, and she had never known that it was all so alive. She never knew that through her entire life she was walking in the spirit of everything, and that the whole world—trees and breezes and leaves and air—was just as alive as her father had been.

There is no peace as complete as to die. It is the end of your story and the end of you. For the living, their stories are still going on. There is strife until death, and there are always problems between people, and even when there are no problems, problems are still there. Being alive is a problem that cannot be solved with living. The self is ever stirred like the leaves in the trees. The leaves quiver and quake, just like we do. A person cannot stop their quivering and quaking, which is the essence of a human life. But no danger comes to the one who is dead. Their problems with everyone are through.

Perhaps we can only give in total beauty and simplicity in the moment of our dying, because that is the only giving that demands no return.

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. Was she supposed to fear becoming the blood and the electrical impulses in the arms of the entire universe?

As she was clearing away jewels, she wondered, Isn’t it time yet to become part of the world? What world? After all, the world was also right where she was living. Her bed was as much the world as anything outside it. The world included her phone, her bed, these jewels. The world included her doing this. How could she ever become more a part of it?

If she gathered together the amount of time she spent looking at websites, and the amount of time she spent looking at the sky, then her life was clearly answering which was the more valuable, for her.

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.

I can say that it is very relaxing. In fact, that’s the nicest thing about it, to shed what evolution made us, remarkable creatures, yet so killing. And to shed what God needs from us, remarkable creatures, yet so critiquing. I am looking forward to it, to my critiquing and killing being gone, and to having the love part being all that remains. Why are people so afraid of

That is true when someone dies—that you often only think about the loving part, but in that way you are just thinking about life, which runs through plants and trees; the loving part which is part of everything. That part of us is the best thing about us, and because it is the least individual thing, it shines through us so beautifully, when it shines. It is easy to remember that part, which is equivalent with life, when the person you love is dead.

So why don’t you focus on the memories that make you happy, the beautiful ones, for that recalls the light which shone through me, and which is the same as the light that shines through you.

Why am I so stuck in the art of the past? Because you are stuck in this situation, thinking it is the only one. There will be a second draft, and the part of you that loves, which is the best part of you, and the most eternal part, will be in the bears, the lizards, the mammoths, and the birds, there in the second draft of life. You are sad because art, which is love, will be gone, but you only need art because you are stuck in the first draft. You are sad because your father had to die, but in the next draft you won’t be sad, because there won’t be fathers.

What is needed is to follow them with faith, with the faith that following them is enough. If you follow, you don’t need to ask what they are.

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.