"Beauty plus pity —that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual."
Vladimir Nabokov, in his lecture on “The Metamorphosis.” Having dispatched with the question of art’s definition, he addresses how we compose reality. Describing a forested landscape and different sorts of men walking across it, sensing it through their different perceptual customs and associations, he says that
…we can take these [disparately perceived] individual worlds, mix them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that mixture, and call it objective reality. We may taste in it a particle of madness if a lunatic passed through that locality, or a particle of complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at [this] lovely field and imagining upon it a factory producing buttons or bombs; but on the whole these mad particles would be diluted in the drop of objective reality we hold up to the light in our test tube. Moreover, this objective reality will contain something that transcends optical illusions and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of lofty emotion, of energy and endeavor (and even here the button king may find his rightful place) —and the craving for a thick steak at the recommended roadside eating place. So when we say reality we are really thinking of all this —in one drop— an average sample of a mixture of a million individual realities.
He the calls this reality “human reality.” So semantically-precise a thinker as Nabokov would not accidentally equate objective reality and human reality; we are already meant to consider the possibility that they are the same. Are they? Is there no truth without sentences, without creaturely perceptions?
Perhaps he means only that, for an artist, what is human is objective; I would agree, and add that it is for this reason that art which satirizes human realities by comparing them to putatively objective realities —usually theoretical in nature, usually political today, once commonly religious, generally faddish in a broad historical sense— is bad art. At the absolute core of good art must be a compassionate comprehension of the primacy of human realities, their totality, whether they belong to an interloping lunatic in the landscape or to The Button King.
It also seems to me that if there are other realities, it is not the essential work of an artist to explore them, although they can of course be used as context or catalyst for the human realities unfolding amidst them. Moreover, those concerned chiefly with any reality beyond human reality —that is, scientists, certain sorts of religious believers, and the archly theoretical— ought to forgive artists for their preoccupation with the latter. There is quite enough attention paid, I think, to worlds larger, more powerful, indifferent to and far beyond ours; that some field of endeavor should attend to human reality is perfectly justifiable.
(via mills)
(via hlewisallways)
