"By awakening our
imagination, art intensifies and complements our own
experience. Art represents
people, cultures, values, and
perspectives on
living, but it does much more. While bringing us pleasure, art teaches
us. While reading or contemplating a painting our minds go elsewhere. We
are taken on a journey into a world where
form and
meaning are
intertwined.
Form matters and gives pleasure. How a work of art is organized — its
technique, its verbal or visual texture, its way of telling — gives
pleasure. So does the inextricable relation between form and content.
The form of imaginative art, as well as the form of well-written
non-fiction, organizes the mess (if not the chaos) of personal life as
well as that of external events. Form not only organizes and controls
art but also other bodies of knowledge within the humanities. Form
imposes structure that our own lives — as we move from moment to moment
through time — may lack.
Narrative — sequential telling — imposes form as it orders and gives
shape. Indeed, in the sense that each of us is continually giving shape
to the stories we tell to and about ourselves, there is continuity
between what we read and see and our own lives. Put another way, what we
read teaches us to find narratives within our own lives and hence helps
us make sense of who we are. Our seeing shapes and patterns in stories
and other kinds of art helps give interpretive order — in the form of a
narrative that we understand — to our lives. We live in our narratives,
our discourse, about our actions, thought, and feelings.
While there is always a gulf between imagined worlds and real ones, does
not the continuity between reading lives and reading texts depend on
our understanding reading as a means of sharpening our perceptions and
deepen our insights about ourselves? Reading is a process of cognition
that depends on actively organizing the phenomena of language both in
the moment of perception and in the fuller understanding that develops
retrospectively."
Daniel Schwartz, Huffington Post
