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In addition to the three mortal fears—of terrible pain and disability and death—everyone needs at least one additional reason to live, a task that inspires.
My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a carpenter and a mason and an engineer. A great artist intuitively understands how the world is built and how it works and how people best fit into it. That’s how they’re able to create beauty—because they know the truth of things. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”
Du Maurier has sympathy for the suffering of others but avoids sentimentality. Her stories are often dark but never spiral into nihilism. She knows that true compassion is noble and demanding, but that tenderness is a vain form of pity indulged in by those who want to feel good about themselves without being put to the inconvenience of doing something.
The three large paintings are abstract expressionist works blazing with colors, shapes, and illusions of movement that allow for an infinite number of interpretations but mean nothing.
“Do you really believe the past is past? I think the past might be our future, that we’re busy laying the groundwork for new Dachaus, new Auschwitzes, all in the name of compassion, progress, justice, prosperity. Of the hard lessons that humanity learns, how many are retained? How very few? The passion of angry ideologues, the ignorance of the arrogant, the ferocity of utopians—how can such people lead the world to anything but its end?”
Life has taught her that it’s mentally exhausting and spiritually depressing to waste energy and time fanning the flames of anger when the reason for her outrage is someone who can’t be affected by anything she does or some malignant force in society that, when challenged, will engulf her and dissolve her in a metastatic frenzy. Patience, steadiness, and hope are healthier than anger; therefore, in spite of evidence to the contrary, she still trusts that the world has been shapen to a purpose and that the purpose is not the triumph of evil.
Neither sunshine nor downpour nor blizzard has the power to make her day better or worse. The weather will be what it is, and she will pass through it as indifferent to its effects as is the Earth in its timeless turning.
In a portrait, the honest artist seeks by subtle techniques to convey something of the truth of the subject, but Nature is a deceiver modeling monsters after lambs.
Fear is useful when it’s on a leash, Avi once said, but it’s always a bad dog when you let it run free in your mind.
One of her favorite dishes is sliced potatoes and onions and green peppers fried in butter, with a little salt, a little pepper, more than a little cilantro, and chopped black olives added at the finish. She starts by peeling two potatoes and slicing them into a bowl of cold water.
When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples.
He has also always known that there are good men and women who wish to serve and govern, as well as a worse kind who seek the power to rule. He has no illusions that wherever the latter are in charge, the law is not equally applied and justice is a dream rather than a reality.
You can refuse to give up, but nonetheless be broken in the process of not surrendering.
What good is genius without humility? What value does it have if it isn’t married undivorceable to kindness and empathy?
Katie remembers reading somewhere that the road to Hell is paved with the bones of faithless priests and that the way is lighted by lampposts that are bishops who, in life, violated their vows without remorse and now burn eternally.
Those for whom self-love is the only love are very skilled at creating fantasies in which they live contentedly until reality threatens to pop their bubble, whereupon they can be capable of any atrocity in defense of their delusions.
“Maybe. The internet is the greatest repository of knowledge in history. But when history is kept in electronic files, the internet is also an efficient memory hole, and truths can be erased as easily as untruths can be fact-checked and sold as the new history.”
