palmerpink

I, generally speaking, love art. I wish I understood it better; sometimes I can articulate its effects on me and what I think; at other times, that's tough for me. This is an attempt at understanding art, if only by trying to understand my experience of it.¹ The title of this post is a bit funny, tho: "New" is misleading—I first drafted it 6 years ago in Dec 2017, updated it in Aug 2018, and revised it a bit this week (Feb 2024). I'll write more about visual art and my ability to interact with it another time, but here's what I've got for now. So I finally went. There's a show right now at the Phillips Collection on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my longtime favorite artist, and I went. I got to see more of his work at one time than I ever have before. And I found myself a new favorite painting among them—not just a favorite out of Renoir's work, but perhaps a favorite among all art I will ever see. The exhibit itself explores the story behind one of Renoir...

So I read Mrs. Dalloway in high school, and it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I'd ever read. One passage in particular, very early in the book, hit me hard with my first experience of the sublime, and stayed with me—and led at last to my first tattoo. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June .  ( Emphasis added; full paragraph included below. From the full text of the novel as made available by the University of Adelaide. ) The paragraph this is from, the 4th paragraph of the novel, is the 1st passage with the stream of consciousness the book is famous for; although self-limited here, the flow is no less gorgeous. In the passage, Clarissa is walking on a street to get those famous fl...