On Art (or, Singing In The Fire)

El and I are both writers and singers; it'll be odd if our kid isn't at least a little artistic. It shouldn't be too taxing for her to learn how the creative act is a reflection of God's creativity through the Word—Fiat Lux and all that sort of thing, don't you know. The hard part will be watching her learn that the world doesn't care about her artistic endeavors. Whatever her vocation turns out to be, at some point she will exsanguinate her soul into some great undertaking, offer her absolute self to the collective perusal, and bang her skull on the vast indifference of the throng. Probably. It's conceivable that she'll A. achieve instant fame as a genius or B. have no artistic inclinations whatsoever. But let us deal in likelihoods.

At the end of Fahrenheit 451 (spoilers, I suppose), the ex-book-burner Montag joins a band of literate exiles in the wilderness, each of whom has committed some great book to memory. "Guard your health," he's told. "If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes." There are works of art that weather the crash of dynasties and the long slow grind of aeons: works that men will kill and die to keep alive. I myself would bayonet a blackguard in the lungs for bringing flame near the last surviving copy of Hamlet or Macbeth. I do not, however, entertain the fancy that future generations will be stabbing each other over dog-eared printouts of this blog. Many people write; few people write immortal works. Any artist of any caliber eventually needs to accept that.

Hamlet, of course, gets its plot from folklore and other Elizabethan dramas, like almost all of Shakespeare's plays—but the folklore and the other dramas are now remembered only as scholarly appendices to Hamlet. In the same way, droves of harrumphing Englishmen were writing comic operettas in the days of Gilbert and Sullivan; flocks of overwrought Russians were writing harrowing novels in the days of Dostoevsky; gaggles of maiden aunts were writing clever mysteries in the days of Agatha Christie. What seems original to us now was usually a drop in a sea of contemporaries, surviving because it was simply the best of its kind. The better a book is, the better its chances. But who knows what was lost in the Library of Alexandria? Beowulf survived in the form of a single manuscript, stuck in a trunk in a farmhouse in Iceland, for eight hundred years, before it was discovered and given back to Europe. Sometimes a work of art endures because Providence has use for it.

But there's a deeper truth: no book is immortal. The race will die, the earth will die, the sun will die. Every symphony and painting, every lyric verse, each statue and basilica brought forth by Man the Maker—all will burn and freeze. And yet, another truth is deeper still: everything's immortal. A sonnet might be remembered for a week or a century on Earth; in Heaven, as a small but real part of the soul that loved it into existence, it will dwell in the Mind of God and the Heart of the Church Triumphant. Not immediately comforting to a neglected sonneteer, but a reason to keep on going. The sooner Kid Toner and her dad get that into their heads, the better—for us and for the whole onward-toiling Body of Christ. You never know what chance phrase from your pen might strengthen a wavering soul.