You are not on the list of the world’s most spoken languages. But yours is the language almost everyone speaks: those who flung themselves off the rooftops, women in psychiatric asylums, entire populations snatched from their continents and deposited on far-sailing ships, teenage girls in correctional institutions, and dazed passengers on a bus leaving Iraq al-Manshiyya, bound for the unknown. You are the only way we can converse with the hills, for instance, or with the passing clouds. Without you, theater would be dreadful. And there would be no point in standing still before paintings, waiting for them to either part their doors or enter us through our wounds. Without you, we never would have learned it was possible to converse with ourselves. You linger in photos of our friends; your presence exposes them for the strangers they are. You are the only remnant of the protest, affixed to the scene for eternity, hiding in the trees. If we were to listen closely to history, you are what we would hear. And we would find you in the hearts of swarming cities, across faces buried in their phones—and in their hesitant glances at unfamiliar eyes in waiting rooms. O silence, we have not built these graves: They are your tongues of stone. Peering through the aperture of oblivion, they hum the dates of birth, and death, like a favorite song.
Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel
You think that your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were ever alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive.
James Baldwin, for Life Magazine, 1963
The arts allow us to contemplate our experiences and therefore invite soul into the picture. They sustain the emotions the soul feeds on and retain the complexity of meaning that is proper to its realm. The mind appreciates the reduction of meaning to logic and classification, but the soul finds more to chew on in diversity, density, and subtlety… if we see ourselves as a puzzle to be solved, then we will be satisfied with rational explanations, but if we see ourselves as made up of unfathomable mysteries, then we will need images that are not excessively reductive. A good artistic presentation may well lead us deeper into confusion and help us feel the chaos of life more vividly than ever. The truth in art is diffuse and largely ineffable, but at the same time it offers a degree of honesty and certainty not found elsewhere.
Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life