Day 0052

Just finished Madame Bovary. It's insistently unremitting, a tightly-spun tragedy so utterly bleak that it has to be either genuinely cheering in a cathartic way or utterly and crushingly depressing. To get to the 'oh at least my life isn't as bad as all that' finale requires a fairly robust disposition, and I'm not sure I could struggle through the repeated snares of woe if I were in my usual equivocal spirits. It's a very fine book though, very neatly and compellingly written.

Took another little trip to the Louvre to look over the Italian paintings at a more respectful pace. Highlights were Perugino, Da Vici, Raphael, Ghirlandaio and the Virgin of Humility by Jacopo Bellini. I'm always drawn to the softness, tenderness and delicateness of the touches and caresses of the hands in his paintings. The others were all either beautifully coloured, beautiful girls or beautiful fabrics.

Such a serene blue in Da Vinci's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, such lovely faces. I stood contemplating it for some time. I was transfixed by the cheeks of Saint Anne, by how sensitively modelled they are. Whilst gazing raptly in my self-congratulatory, well-done-you're-looking-at-something-important way, my view was interrupted by a young girl being carried by her mother. As they walked past, obscuring the painting, I felt an instantaneous, lurching disorientation between the beauty that art can attain and the unapproachable beauty and realness of reality. I saw her little living face, moving, thinking, expressing, changing, so truly precious, unique and irreplaceable and so full of an infinity of life. Immediately I felt how profound the gulf is between the vitality of life and the inertness of the flat canvas, and suddenly the world's greatest paintings felt instantly and lamentably irrelevant.

No matter how close to perfection the arts climb -- and that painting is up in the highest of heights -- there really is absolutely no similarity with the fullness of the real world. It is only convention and habit that make it possible to fool ourselves that there is some equivalence to be made, when really there is nothing but the dimmest and faintest of echoes between the two.

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.Herman Melville, Moby Dick

It's the difference between the mild discomfort of reading about the agony that drives someone to commit suicide by arsenic in Madame Bovary and experiencing for yourself the untellable dread of the void itself. One is but the faintest possible echo of the other, which would eclipse and annihilate its immeasurably weakened impression utterly.

But sometimes perhaps these dim echoes are all we can cope with. The beauty and the complexity and the suffering and the confusion of the real world are too truly and tremendously overwhelming that we need to recast them into immutable artworks that we can contemplate and unravel and begin to understand.