Let me give you the context to why I’m addressing this question: I was drunk. It was sunny. I was in a garden with friends and we were having a barbecue. It was the day before the elections in Belgium. We all had different levels of intoxication.
Here’s a simple formula, Alcohol + Elections = Drunk & Incoherent debates about how the world should be run.
And then it happened, one person asked: Why the f*** are we funding the arts?
It resulted in a debate with two clear camps, the “yes, we should fund the arts” group and the “no, we shouldn’t” group. Here is a brief summary of their arguments:
- Art doesn’t bring money or create useful and long term stable jobs that finance our government
- It’s important because art feels good, gives meaning to life and is vital for the entertainment industry.
No, nothing more than this was said at the time, alcohol doesn’t favor deep conversations.
The only agreement between the camps was that art is a form of entertainment.
I agreed too, but it seemed a much too simple answer to the question: Why the f*** should we fund the arts?
I tried to communicate my point of view. Unfortunately, I fell down.
I tried to stop their empty discussions. I tried to scream: “Art is way more than that”
They pretended like they didn’t understand me. They told me that I should articulate…
Anyway, I will now present some “art” to illustrate what I want to say about why we should fund the arts. Here’s a quote:
The entertainment was less lavish than before, but they still lived on with a certain lifestyle, and everything lower would have been unthinkable for them.
This is a quote from a story that I’m reading at the moment. I’m guessing that this doesn’t give you much of a clue about the source of this quote.
Still, let’s see what we can deduce from this quote. We have people with a certain lifestyle. A high one. They now have less lavish entertainment. Also, they wouldn’t even consider to stop this entertainment or to live with a lower lifestyle.
Dear reader, depending on your age, I bet that you know some people who are used to the finer and more expensive things in life. Maybe at some point in their lives, they were encouraged to lower their lifestyle. Maybe you’ve even noticed what happened to them when they couldn’t taste those finer things in life anymore.
What the author here is showing us is that some people will cling to their lifestyle whatever life throws at them. Their lifestyle defines them. Anything lower would mean that they lost everything that makes them and their life amazing.
I wholeheartedly confess that this is my interpretation of this quote. The author is not writing what I just described in the last paragraphs.
He’s describing some characters in his story. He is describing their troubles. He’s describing how they’re trying to keep enjoying the finer things in life while being forced by life to reduce them.
The author must have taken some inspiration for this. Or did he make this all up by himself? Or did he forget that he observed this in people?
I’ll take the risk to say that the author observed his surroundings, saw this happen to people that he knew. Then he put his observations into fictional characters in a story. He did this to tell a story with meaning.
He used fiction to say something about reality and about a certain human situation or human trait: the human desire to want the best and to try to keep it when faced with losing it.
I might be totally wrong about what the author intended here, but those are very human traits. A trait that most humans share.
So the big reveal, where is this from?
*drum roll*
*drum roll stops*
Care to guess where this is from? Where do you think this is from? Which period? Which country? What genre of fiction? What length of book? Which language?
Obviously I’ve chosen the most general quote from a random chapter and adapted it to make it even more difficult for you to find.
*Drum roll starts again*
It’s from War & Peace by Tolstoy.
It’s about the Rostov family, a family of Moscow nobles mismanaging their finances but still wanting to create lavish parties to keep up appearances for a whole bunch of reasons. As you read the book, those reasons are explained in detail and I empathized with them. Reading their reasons and how they arrived at their situation, I think that I might’ve acted exactly like them.
This is why it is a timeless masterpiece. Tolstoy touched something essential and timeless about human nature. The refusal to change in the face of adversity. He made me realize something about human nature. If I was in their shoes, I would probably have acted in exactly the same way.
He touched a fundamental truth. Here, Tolstoy is acting like a scientist of human nature. Describing the human laws that govern us. Here he speaks of a simple human law: when things are good, we don’t want them to change.
Here’s another quote from something else that I’m reading right now:
Revenge is for the weak who cannot face their sorrow. Will you stay and face your sorrow or keep running away it?
Let’s dissect, I will reveal that yes, this is a piece of dialogue. The speaker is speaking to someone who is on the path of revenge. We can deduce that the speaker knows the addressed and their sorrow. We can also deduce that the addressed has been on the path of revenge for a while and that the addressed only temporarily came back. We also know that the speaker deals with their sorrow by facing it while the addressed deals with sorrow by revenge.
I will reveal another fact, it is a betrayal from someone the addressed trusted.
Here are a few questions for you: Have you ever been hurt by someone you trusted? How did you deal with it? What was the most difficult actions/decisions you had to take? Are you at okay with the path you chose? What does ‘being okay’ mean for you in this context?
I don’t know you, I don’t know how those questions will affect you and where they will lead your mind.
The only thing I can do, is give you my answers and how they link to this quote:
Yes, I’ve been hurt. When I was younger, I used to want to destroy those betrayers. Sometimes I succeeded and most of the time I didn’t. At one point, I realized that the path of revenge just dominated me. It takes me over completely. It becomes my attitude, my thoughts and my emotions. I lose all control of myself. I knew that I needed to start to let go. It was very hard for me, but I started to let go, little by little. No, I wasn’t going to forgive, never. My goal was to accept that I’ve been hurt and move on. This is very hard for me, it’s so much easier to hate the betrayers. Yes, I prefer this new path, because I can feel that my wounds heal faster and heal better. Accepting and facing my sorrow doesn’t mean that I forget, it just means that I accept and move on with my life. I free myself from the hate and the need for revenge. I’m not a slave to my wounds anymore.
This is why this quote speaks to me. When I followed the story of the addressed. In that moment in the story, I want the addressed to understand this too.
Obviously, this is a piece of fiction and none of those characters exist. But coming back to reality, I believe that we would live in a better world if everybody understood this.
Let’s move on, what you want to know is: who wrote this one and where is it from?
*drum roll*
Berserk written by Kentaro Miura.
Berserk is a dark fantasy epic starring Guts and the band of the hawks led by the charismatic Griffith. Guts finally finds happiness and a family in the band of the hawk after a miserable childhood filled suffering from abuse and also… Being raped…
Anyway, Guts even finds love in the band of the hawk. Her name is Casca, she’s strong female warrior in the band of the hawks.
So when Griffith, the leader, sacrificed the whole band of the hawk to demons to become a demon lord, unsurprisingly, Guts was hurt. On top of this, Griffith raped Casca in front of Guts.
Guts manages to barely save Casca and himself from the demons.
But Casca is traumatized by the whole ordeal. She can’t speak or talk and has lost her whole personality. She’s just a shell of who she was.
Guts finds help taking care of Casca so he can go on a path of revenge against Griffith. When he comes back, The person taking care of Casca says to Guts: Revenge is for the weak who cannot face their sorrow. Will you stay and face your sorrow or keep running away it?
So that’s dark fantasy for you… cheerful, right? I do hope that I convinced you to read this manga. I guarantee you it’s more than just rape…
Jokes aside, this piece of fiction explores dark themes like betrayal, revenge, meaning, trust, despair, strength, weakness, love, ambition, devotion, sacrifice, etc.
For me, it is clear that Kentaro Miura observed things about human nature that he talks about in his fictional universe. This quote is seems to me to be applicable to any situation of hurt and revenge. It speaks about how hate & violence is easier than acceptance and moving on with what you really want out of life. And what you really want, is rarely revenge. For Guts, the path of revenge has been forced on him. But it is clear from the story that he just wants to find a home with a family. That is his true desire.
If you were Guts, would you accept what Griffith did to your friends, to the only family you ever had and to the woman you love? Would you try to spend as much time as possible with the shell of the woman you love? Or, if you had the power like Guts, would you seek revenge?
*Deep silence pondering this deep question*
Switching topics, when I create art, it’s a way for me to express things that I couldn’t do with conventional means. It allows me to express things that aren’t clear to myself. When I create something honest and true, it affects me deeply, it changes me.
Writing this article helped me to clarify to myself why art is important to me, why we need to fund it.
No, I had no idea what the point of this article was going to be when I started writing it. I didn’t have a clear answer to the question when I started to write this article. I just had feelings and intuition that some part of me had something to express linked to this question.
Now, I might edit this article to make it seem like everything was clear from the start. Of course not, I was too drunk to have a coherent thought at that barbecue.
Jokes aside, We, humans, rarely know why we do anything. We feel impulses and go in a certain direction and it gets clearer once we look back. That is why wisdom comes with age.
Art is important precisely because it mirrors the most profoundly our human nature.
I only took examples of storytelling, but this example could have been done with paintings, pieces of music, movies, etc.
The masterpieces offer us a mirror into our human nature.
Great artists make masterpieces that touch everyone because they express timeless truths about human nature that are hidden in themselves. They help us discover ourself. Literally discover, as in, removing the cover to reveal our human nature.
Art help up to discover the laws of the way we humans work by illustrating them.
So why fund art? To me this question is like the question: Why fund science?
I believe that part of the answer would be that funding them is just about helping those scientists get better results faster to benefit mankind.
Funding art is about helping the researchers of human nature helping us better understand ourselves so we can be better humans. It’s about helping them doing this faster than if they had no help.
In a world facing challenges in the realm of the environment, meaning, mental health, war, politics, etc. I believe that art can play the role of making bridges and linking us all to our deep human nature.
That’s why I would fund art.
I couId have ended this article with the last sentence but I wanted to add a little post scriptum about a specific point discussed at the barbecue.
It’s about art as entertainment. I will refer to one of my favorite poems on this subject.
To give some personal context, when I first read this poem, I felt as if the poet knew me personally. But that’s impossible right?
How would this poet write something addressed to me personally through the centuries? Does he have a time traveling device? Has he been observing me this whole time?
Well no, obviously not. What he did, is that he encapsulated in that poem some deep truth about human nature, a truth about “entertainment” and why we consume “art”.
It’s titled “To the reader” and it’s written by Charles Baudelaire:
Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.
Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.
On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.
The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.
Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.
Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.
If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,
There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;
He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!