Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
The values captured in art shouldn’t remain in the museum – they should go with us into the playroom.
But the museum is only a prelude to a life well lived.
We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.
I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers’ example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states – a code which might help us feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations.
In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.
What enables him to think of himself as sane is only a certain fragile chemical good fortune, but he knows he would be very much in the market for a tragedy if ever life chose to test him properly.
We aren’t overwhelmed by anger whenever we are frustrated; only when we first believed ourselves entitled to a particular satisfaction and then did not receive it.
Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.
It is essential for the happiness of couples and the single that one regularly rehearses the very many good reasons why it’s OK to spend one’s life without anyone. Only once singlehood has completely equal prestige with its alternative can we ensure that people will be free in their choices and hence join couples for the right reasons; because they love another person, rather than because they are terrified of remaining single.
We require such ‘sensuous’ arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truths will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material.
The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder.
Proust’s novel is filled with those we might call bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.
Many people after a horrific few months or years of breakdown, will say: “I don’t know how I’d ever have gotten well if I hadn’t fallen ill”.
We are ready for relationships not when we have encountered perfection, but when we have grown willing to give flaws the charitable interpretations they deserve. This is because the success or failure of a relationship doesn’t hinge on whether the other is deeply flawed – they are. What matters is how we interpret their failings; how we understand the reasons why they have previously been and will again in the future be very difficult to be with.
We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.
We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past and we will be idiots again in the future – and that is OK.
The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires.
Just as a childhood can be released from the odour of a washing powder or cup of tea, an entire culture can spring from the angles of a few lines.
Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.
It is the capacity to tolerate difference that is the true marker of the right person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.