To Make Love to Life

Abstract

In this troubled world we need huge doses of both the socially objective and the personally subjective, since each exists only by virtue of the other.The errors we may make I am sure lie in our inabilities to embrace those aspects of life which seem contradictory to us, not only by a separation of the subjective and the objective—an oversight which is surely responsible for the isolation of the artist in a materialistic society—but also by a schism between body and spirit. (Perhaps this is the same thing.) This curious compulsion to resolve life into an either-or finality is deadlier than death because it makes enemies of us and puts daggers in our prejudiced hands. In the world of art, the separation of the “sensuous” from the “sublime,” the “expressive” from the “contemplative,” are just as deadly to the work of art, because it can lead only to what is a matter of fashion and not of form.