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 felt so alone in those days. Not that she minded. 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.

When it was time to move out, she opened the door to collect her books and found they had all moulted and their pages had gone wavy with the damp, deep cold of the winter.

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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?

There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. In the beginning, we were so innocent of this fact—of how much we could be hated, by people we thought would like us, or by people we thought wouldn’t care. But there was so much more hate than any of us had the capacity to understand.

And why not? 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.

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, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.

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

Yet in the midst of all this, one could still see, on one’s bookshelf, books that were hundreds—even thousands!—of years old, that were relevant today. Yet none of the books which were twenty years old were the least bit relevant anymore.

How a book has to make it through that awkward stage—when it is twenty years too old, yet not quite old enough—before it becomes something natural, an integral part of human civilization, as solid and inevitable as a tree.

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

There is no point in loving something that is not a bit within reach.

She had felt his spirit ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body, then spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels spreading inside, that warm and tangy feeling. But this feeling was even warmer, and even more spreading all the way through her, and the peace after an orgasm was nothing compared to the peace that fell over her after his death.

shes talking about her father…..

We know which people are threatening to the gods by how exhausted they feel all the time. Those who would not make as many fixes are not given as much fatigue. You know the gods consider you dangerous if you are tired all the time.