Posted 6 months ago
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Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being. Whilst feeling the slings and arrows of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we do not feel our own, which are base because they are ours and because they are in themselves base.

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art or our rather elementary forms of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all bring with them their own disappointments. One grows sated or disillusioned with love. We wake from sleep and whilst we slept, we did not live. The price of drugs is the ruin of the very body they were used to stimulate. But there is no disillusion in art because its illusory nature is clear from the start. One does not wake from art because, although we dream it, we are not asleep. There is no tribute or fine to pay for having enjoyed art. Since in some way it is not ours, we do not have to pay for or repent on the pleasure it offers us.

By art I mean everything that delights us without being ours - a glimpse of a landscape, a smile bestowed on someone else, a sunset, a poem, the objective universe.

To posses something is to lose it. To feel something without possessing it is to keep it, because in that way one extracts its essence.

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

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