“The death of art,” someone once said, “would not be the end of beauty. It would be the end of the human capacity to recognize it.” But I wonder. I think we’d still see beauty — raw, unframed, untamed — even if our hands could no longer shape it. Maybe that would be a mercy. Maybe then we’d see the world as it is, without the fevered lens of our longing. If there were no paintings, no songs, no films to crawl into — perhaps then we’d be healthy. The wolves and sparrows seem to do just fine without sonnets. Maybe we
could too.
Without art, we’d stop embalming time in oil and trapping light in paint. We’d live, at last, inside the blur — the moment itself — brief as breath and twice as holy. Without music, we’d learn the hymns of the wind and rain. Without love stories, we’d have to stumble into love on our own — unscripted, unedited, and without delusions. Without the blinding colors of faith’s frescoes, we might see that holiness was never on the ceiling at all, but under our feet — in the dirt, the noise, the ordinary day. Without dance, we’d conserve energy for kindness and mercy.
Without art, we’d be forced to face the dull ache of living — and maybe that’s where the miracle would begin. We’d see the world not as a masterpiece, but as a mess worth loving. We’d stop comparing life to the painted fantasy of love or happiness and find, at last, that the real thing is smaller, humbler, and more enduring. Maybe, if we were stripped of art, we’d look around — and find that the world, for all its noise and flaw and hunger, is enough. And maybe, seeing it as it truly is, we might even be happy.
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