Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
Interpretation
Art is complex and unfamiliar, requiring time and effort to understand.
Jeanette Winterson suggests that engaging with art is much like navigating a foreign city. It demands patience and exploration, as one must learn to communicate in its unique language, signifying that art transcends our usual perceptions and requires a deeper understanding beyond surface familiarity.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of art in modern culture.
What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.
Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.
In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.' Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest. Feel for yourself.
History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
I don't think the goal is, 'How big a star did you ever become?' I think the goal is, 'Were you able to express yourself?'
For children of my generation, anime was an escape from Japan's loser complex following World War II. Anime wasn't foreign. It was our own.
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
And that's what art is, a form in which people can reflect on who we are as human beings and come to some understanding of this journey we are on.
I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.
I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.
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