Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
Interpretation
Art creates a world of its own, demanding our full attention and devotion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the nature of art and its ability to captivate our focus completely. He suggests that in the presence of a work of art, whether it's a poem, a sculpture, or a beautiful garden, it becomes the sole pursuit worthy of our efforts, momentarily overshadowing all else in life. This intensity of focus on beauty, whether in crafted creations or nature, emphasizes the profound impact art has on our perception of what is meaningful.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of art in our lives, one might use this quote to highlight how art captures our attention.
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?
I'm suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that's always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.
Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.
There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo...it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange.
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.
I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
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