It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
Interpretation
Art helps us to appreciate and understand beauty in the world around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the vital role of art in shaping our ability to perceive beauty. While beauty surrounds us, our natural perception may be clouded or unclear, and it is through art that we can refine our vision and appreciation for what is beautiful in life.
In practice
During a gallery opening, I shared Emerson's quote to emphasize the transformative power of art.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
Talent borrows, genius steals!
If the audience knew what they wanted then they wouldn't be the audience, they would be the artist.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
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