See also: "Jayne Anne Phillips: Inside Culture"
Bibliomancy: Art Is Freedom
Bibliomancy
collects insights and observations about the reading/writing life and
life in the arts generally, words that could aptly describe the reasons
Atelier26 exists.
“It appears to me that no one can ever have made a serious
artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of
revelation—of freedom. One perceives in that case—by the light of a heavenly
ray—that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all
vision. … That is sufficient answer to those who … stick into its divine unconscious
bosom little prohibitory inscriptions on the end of sticks, such as we see in
public gardens—‘It is forbidden to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to touch
the flowers; it is not allowed to introduce dogs or to remain after dark; it is
requested to keep to the right.’ … The first advantage of [the young writer’s]
taste will be to reveal to him the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets. …
I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there were a part of a novel which
is the story and part of it which for mystical reasons is not. … The story and
the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and the thread, and I never
heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the
needle, or the needle without the thread. … I should remind [a young writer]
first of the magnificence of the form that is open to him, which offers to
sight so few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities. The other arts,
in comparison, appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which
they are exercised are so rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can
think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said,
that it be sincere. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson
of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it.” –from “The Art of the
Novel” by Henry James (1884). This excerpt found in The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, Solidarity Index
See also: "Jayne Anne Phillips: Inside Culture"
See also: "Jayne Anne Phillips: Inside Culture"
