Laurus came to mind when I read Chris Beha's fine short essay in
Harper's about the present state of the arts.
Beha wrote:
---The critic Wesley Morris wrote a much-discussed
New York Times Magazine essay published in October about art as “a battleground for social justice.” “Everything means too much now,” he contended. But my own feeling is the opposite—everything other than politics means too little.
These days we divide our cultural consumption into two categories. There is escapist entertainment, the value of which lies precisely in its ultimate insignificance, serving as a kind of release valve for the pressure of our day-to-day lives. Then there are cultural objects that matter because they advance a political argument. When people complain about the politicization of culture, what they mostly mean is that things that had once stood comfortably in category one—late-night TV, football, the Oscars—are increasingly migrating to category two. People seem to have entirely forgotten a third category: culture that matters for its own sake, culture that enacts “the search for knowledge and beauty.”
Knowledge and beauty; pleasure and delight; the contemplation of truth, irrespective of its instrumental uses; the intimate encounter with another human consciousness offered by the best works of art—these are among the things that make life worth living. If we set them aside until we have made it safely through our present emergency, we will never return to them, because our present emergency will never be through.-----
Eugene Vodolazkin's fantasy novel
Laurus reminds us of the rewards of writing that is neither mere "escapist entertainment" nor political activism in verbal form. I really think that, for some of us, reading it could be a refreshing reminder -- "Oh, yeahhh -- there
is that dimension of literary depth and richness that I used to explore with eagerness and, sometimes, much effort, that was unpredictable but so intrinsically worthwhile."
harpers.org
