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Two Ways of Spending an Hour

Someone looks at their phone for an hour. They are interested the entire time. They scroll through their Instagram, then their email, then their YouTube shorts, then their Instagram again (after all, they posted earlier and are checking to see who liked their post), then their TikTok, then their Instagram yet again. It’s easy and fun. It feels like relaxing, a full body and mind relaxation. They are encountering new, titillating things nearly every moment. Their eyes and mind linger on nothing for long. A short about diet. A short about building a fence. A short about a group of girls in bikinis at Spring Break. There interest feels insatiable, and they don’t realize how strange their activity would look to an observer, flickering quickly back and forth between wildly different images. When the hour ends, they look up from their phone and the world looks a little fuzzier, a little sadder, a little more grey.

Someone reads Anna Karenina for an hour. They are occasionally bored, or confused. Russian names are long, and they are pretty sure each character has three or four names, but they aren’t certain. But there is a good plot, and they like the characters. It’s a bit of a trial. And yet, there are those moments, ones where something is illuminated in a completely new way, like when Levin skates beautifully, not knowing that Kitty doesn’t love him. They understand something new in that moment, something inarticulable, at least until later reflection. There are even stretches where the minutes slip away–what first felt difficult, perhaps impossible–is suddenly easy and completely immersive. They see the characters, feel the things they feel. If it’s a man, they find that they’ve never seen a woman quite as deeply and truly, perhaps, as they see Anna; if a woman, they feel they understand something about the souls of good men and bad men through Levin and Oblonsky. When the hour ends, they look up from the book, and things are a little brighter, a little sharper, a little more clear.

What has the great work of art done? Imagining a third scenario might help.

Imagine a third scenario. Someone looks at the night sky over Lake Erie for an hour. They aren’t necessarily titillated, but there is a quiet engagement and wonder. They don’t know much about constellations, but they can make out the Big Dipper, and from time to time they see something pass overhead. Maybe it’s a shooting star. Maybe it’s a satellite, or an airplane, or a drone. The waves quietly lap on the shore. Their mind drifts in and out. They think of a mistake they made earlier, and they regret it, and then think about the future, or some pleasurable moment from the day, or a plan in the near or far future. Perhaps even the gestalt of their whole life may hit them. When the hour ends, they go inside and go to sleep, and the day is done.

So again, what has the art done? With John Senior, I would like to posit that the great art of Anna Karenina has done something like given you a vision of life in its totality. Your own life, your own personal experiences, your encounters with nature, can of course give you that to some degree, particularly if you reflect on these things constantly. But great art, great fiction, allows you to see the world through the eyes of a great artist who has considered their story and the people in it with intense, loving contemplation. You then, for the time you read the book, are given access to that very same contemplative, loving mind. From the pages of the book, you can then actually see your own life and experiences a little more clearly, learning to see things properly with the eyes of the heart.

Seeing in Two Dimensions

I’ll dive more fully into this when discussing character writing, but an important thing to note about phone use is this. One of the great promises of social media is its connectivity. The promise–people my age remember the promise, because it was given to us when we were children and the technology was new–was that you would connect even more with people. The utopian vision given us was that our communities would be even better, our friendships even stronger. We’d all grow closer to each other by interacting constantly online.

The issue (or one of the issues) was this–the way social media is designed, with every post and picture meant to be easily and quickly consumed, people on social media by necessity turn themselves into a sort of easily understood and digestible product. People frame themselves as the tough, masculine man who does things like hunting, or as the cool, adventurous girl who surfs and skateboards, or as the carnivore who only eats meat, attributing this to a full improvement of their entire life, or as the vegetarian who does the same, or as the tradwife, or a golf instructor, or a handyman who takes on outrageous projects, or whatever (you see many of the most popular influencers lean toward making themselves not simply 2-dimensional people, but 2-dimensional cartoons). People make themselves into 2-dimensional figures, easily understood and consumed for a quick turnaround for “likes”. This is what D.C. Schindler means when he talks about the nature of social media and “liking”. The likes are necessarily only surface-level attachments. We like very simply, easily understood things. We are in no way even given the opportunity to love these people because we actually do not know them, because people are in fact complicated and 3-dimensional, not 2-dimensional.

And if you use social media, you do it to yourself, essentially trying to market yourself for likes. If you do something other than this, attempting to show different sides of yourself, good and bad, interesting and not so interesting, you are either not very well-received because you haven’t created a true Brand of You, or even that is seen as a kind of ploy for attention, which it quite likely is.

So, when we look up from our phones, having ingested a 2-dimensional world that is something akin to a Halloween bag stuffed with different candies, always something new and delicious, never something nourishing, and we look up to the real world, our imperfect apartment, perhaps our spouse who we do have to see in 3-dimensions, our own lives which we certainly have to see in 3-dimensions (though we can try our darnedest to not through drugs or manipulating our circumstances with plastic surgery or whatever), well, it’s clear to see why actual real life would seem a little dull and dim. Who wants to eat a steak after they’ve stuffed their faces with Halloween candy?

Art & Contemplation

So why is art different? Why does it make life feel more rich, not less? It is because art teaches us to see. Like the Professor says in Fahrenheit 451, true art shows the “pores” in the face of life. It shows us reality in some way, by showing people in 3-dimensions (great art can also show an idealized figure, like the Hero, and can be great art in that way with a 2-dimesnsional figure who shows us what we could be–again, something we’ll get to when we fully discuss characters). Through its many layers (character, theme, symbol, plot, arcs, etc.) it can give a true, organizing picture of life itself. This is also what Flannery O’Connor means when she says that writing fiction (and I think, by extension, reading fiction) is a “plunge into reality” and is “very shocking to the system.” Fiction (and great art in general) has a way of plunging us deeper into the reality of life than we are actually accustomed to doing, which then makes our own lives much more interesting and loveable.

Ok! So how exactly does this happen?

The best art stems from richly observing life, reality, people, God, and stems out to its audience to give them those same qualities. A person who lives their life in reality, away from their phones, has a lot of raw material. They’ve encountered reality. The work of the artist is then to shape this raw material into a true whole. Great art, in a sense, shows us how life itself, reality itself, works and is. Beauty, and beautiful art, is “truth and goodness on the meeting ground of the sensible,” (D.C. Schindler).

One of, if not the deepest reality that the artist can perceive is the reality of love, of life wanting to give of itself, communicate itself, to all around it. As Peter Kreeft says, “Things are in love with other things…fire gives warmth, light gives clarity.” Things give of themselves to other things. There is a fundamental generosity and relational quality to being, and as the Catholic believes, this is one of the great truths God has revealed about Himself to us, that He is a relationship of love, the three Persons in constant communication of love with one another and with the world they created out of this same love.

So for a writer, the most important things we can do is to love our work into existence, and in particular, to love our characters into existence.

George Saunders is a contemporary author who has seen this very thing. He talks about a writer who writes the sentence “Bob was an asshole.” While at first, the sentence pleases the author with how direct, smug, and kind of humorous it is, the artist is ultimately displeased with the sentence. What did it mean that Bob was an asshole? How? Why? Eventually, the author, through revision (meaning, re-contemplation of the story and individual sentence) comes to something like “Bob snapped at the barista, who reminded him so much of his dead wife, whom he missed dearly.” The sentence and Bob and the worldview of the story have come into much sharper focus through this process of revising, of contemplating the story and its characters more and more deeply. Saunders and I agree that the only way to great art is this sort of contemplation in love, a viewing of the story with the eyes of the heart.

In fact, a way of thinking about creating art is that it’s a kind of contemplative map or board that you slowly, lovingly fill in and deepen.

You’ll find, for example, when writing in essay, that you discover more by the final draft than you had initially thought to put in. Ideas layer on, examples add up, new ideas emerge.

A similar thing happens when writing fiction. Tolstoy first conceived of the character of Anna as a wretched, ugly, fat, miserable woman through whom he could teach a moral lesson. But, along the way, he fell in love with her, and she became much more than that as a result.

The Renaissance

One of the reasons the Renaissance is perhaps the greatest period for visual art ever is because it captured more of reality than any other period. While the Middle Ages captured many deep, spiritual realities through its more highly-symbolic art, the Renaissance was able to marry those spiritual realities to material, bodily realities.

What is true of the Renaissance is true of the Victorian period in English literature, or more generally, the 18th/19th centuries in World Literature. Through their fictions, these great authors (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Tolsoy, Dostoevsky, Checkhov, etc.) were able to capture very human life while marrying it to higher, spiritual truths and realities. They captured more of reality more truly than other eras (with brief, bright lights throughout the ages–the greats like Homer, Dante, Chaucer, etc.).

A False Worldview Harms the Art

Now, I didn’t always hold the view that should an artist’s worldview be wrong, their art would be seriously harmed. Beauty, I thought then, was completely disconnected from Truth, and so something could be beautiful and at the same time false. I think now that a falseness in worldview does serious damage to art.

If art is meant to reflect and organize reality, be a “deep plunge” into reality that sort of “shocks” us, wakes us up to our own lives and the things at stake, then a false worldview means a plunge into a false world, one that does not accurately reflect our own, and can thus either leave us wondering the point of reading something so wildly false or actively mislead our understanding about our life. I think about a few works in particular. One is Blood Meridian, one of Cormac McCarthy’s finest works. Many virtues of great writing are there. The story is intense, some of the characters are incredible, the language is unbelievably strange yet precise. There are scenes which are completely unforgettable, and a real power to the story. And yet, the worldview of the story is that evil is everywhere, goodness nowhere, and ultimately, we must submit to the nihilistic violence of man. Now, the depth of this lie, the weight of it, the intensity of it, is part of what gives the book its magnificent power. And yet, and yet. Ultimately, one must look up from the book and realize that love exists, that justice exists, that people sometimes do good for goodness’ sake. And one must conclude that they’ve just seen a wild, intense, but utterly false picture of the world, one that has given them, as a result, insight into very little. Worse, one may come to believe it, and perhaps come to respect, say, a school shooter, or a suicide bomber. This is why The Road, which I think gestures toward hope through the character of the son and the people who ultimately come to care for him after the father’s death, is, I think, a more complete, probably better work. It has a more complete worldview.

Something similar is seen in the difference between the film versions of The Lord of the Rings and Villeneuve’s Dune. In Dune, everything is about power. The Harkonnens want power, the Atreides want power, the Emperor wants power, the Fremen want power. Power is the controlling spirit of that world and that story. This is why, when Paul wins at the end of the movie, we basically feel nothing. Power, albeit good-looking power, has won out over another Power, a worse-looking power. The difference between the Atreides and the Harkonnens is basically aesthetic. If the Harkonnens had won, I don’t think we’d feel the depth of tragedy, because again, no deep tragedy would have occurred.

Now, in The Lord of the Rings, we get a much more complete picture of the world. Basically, in that story, there is good, and there is evil. Goodness manifests in characters who are virtuous, heroic, selfless, open to friendship and love, concerned for the past and the future, caring for the world. It manifests in architecture that is more humble, and even when grandiose, such as Minis Tirith or Helm’s Deep, seems to fit in naturally with the landscape, with the natural world, using material found naturally in the world around it, rocks and stones and granite. It manifests in people putting aside their lower concerns for some greater cause and good and in creative problem solving to complex situations. Evil, meanwhile, manifests in characters who are selfish, conniving, quick to betray, hungry for power. It manifests in architecture made out of metal, architecture that actually destroys the world around it in order to be made, with images of lava, fire, machinery, and so on. It manifests in a critical stupidity, a lack of sight even from an all-seeing eye which is blinded to humility, to the idea that someone would humbly do something good for another person. When the good guys triumph in this film, we are jubilant, elated. We see how true a victory this is. If Sauron had won, we would have sensed and felt the great horror and tragedy of this, all because it has been made clear what goodness really is and what evil really is.

So while both are excellent blockbuster movies, it seems that Lord of the Rings will be loved and cherished for much longer than Dune, and I think this genuinely stems from the former movie having a truer, fuller picture of the world. It is a better work of art because it is more true. As a result, when you watch Dune, you are entertained and probably even impressed, where when you watch The Lord of the Rings, you are entertained, impressed, and edified. The art has stepped up to match reality and your soul’s lofty desires.

Even imagine a much smaller example, say, the proclivity of people in horror movies to make incredibly dumb decisions. Everyone at a certain point notices this, and it harms the art, it harms the believability because it has become detached from reality. Moments like these in art make the audience take a step back from the work and test it against what they know about people and the world, and the art comes up wanting. Enough of these moments pile on, and the viewer is likely to simply close the book, turn off the tv, and do something else instead.

AI

I want to touch briefly on AI use in art. Basically, I hope that it’s clear from all the preceding that I think AI is the death of art. One way of considering this is by considering the artist themself, the person behind the art.

One could argue that AI merely does what humans do; it takes all the art it has ingested and turns out something new that is a kind of hybrid composite of all of those other things. AI has access to all the novels, short stories, and so on that we have (though hopefully in reality it actually doesn’t for the sake of artists owning their work), and it simply does exactly what we do.

However, this only describes part of what an artist does. Of course, a writer has hopefully read a lot of fiction, especially pursuing reading the “greats” as well as reading widely in things that they enjoy. Now, something is already critically different here. An artist actually encounters these things, wrestles with them in their mind, comes to love them or despise them in their heart. These are obviously things the AI cannot do. An AI has no relational capabilities because the AI itself is not a person. It has no soul. It doesn’t have the capacities for the highest orders of reasoning (exiting the Cave and coming to know reality through firsthand experience and thought), nor does it have access to the deeper reality of love and relationship. Similarly, an artist has actually lived a life and encountered reality and developed an actual point of view, all things the AI also cannot do, and even in theory, will never be able to do. So while there is a chance that AI-created false art will become bestsellers (though I really doubt that as well–AI slop is just that: slop–and even human slop like Wiseau’s The Room is far more compelling than AI slop), there is as much a chance for AI to write the next War and Peace as there is for a cockroach to do so.

Living in Reality

So a task of the beginner writer is to learn to see things properly. As John Gardner wrote that writers should watch as little tv as possible, watching only the really excellent stuff, so as to not start putting two-dimensional tv actions in their fiction, so would the fiction writer today do even better to stay off the Internet, AI, and particularly social media, as much as possible, lest they learn to see all people as 2-dimensional absurdities. These things will give you the wrong ideas about life and people, which will greatly diminish your art. Pay attention to reality, to your life, and for heaven’s sakes, read some philosophy and history. These things will all be touched on again later when I write on the writer’s vocation.

Book Burning and Education

Literature has a tough question to answer in education, namely, why is it even there? Beyond that, why does it seem to be taken a bit more seriously than, say, an art or music class, but less seriously than the obvious pillars of modern education, math and science?

This is an ancient dilemma. In a rather infamous scene in The Republic concerning how a person is to be educated, Socrates advocates for removing poetry from his Republic. While praising Homer as clearly the greatest of all the poets, the one with the greatest command of story and language, he also criticizes Homer for his portrayal of the gods as deeply flawed, petulant, argumentative beings. Socrates’ reasons is that the gods must in fact be perfect, so to portray them in such a way is a lie. As such, Homer, in an ideal society, would be banned, lest people be led astray from true belief and right worship.

I’ve also heard that, in some medical schools, Samuel Shem’s The House of God, an irate satirical diatribe against the medical establishment, is recommended and fought against in equal measure. Those who recommend it tell people that it will open their eyes to all the horrible things about medicine, while those who oppose students reading it say that it will make these young doctors-in-training jaded about the very idea that medicine can be helpful. Notice that both sides of the argument agree on one thing–that the work will deeply affect the reader and change the way they see medicine.

And of course, every public school and liberal arts college celebrates Banned Books Week, but de Beauvoir forbid someone says they read Ayn Rand, or, far worse, says their favorite books are the Gospels, or the Letters of Paul!

It seems, like so much in our world, we hold two contradictory ideas in our minds at once with very little attention to the cognitive dissonance this should cause. On the one hand, we despise book banners and book burners of all stripes–one of the most common images of the Nazis is a large pile of books being burned. On the other hand, if a someone were to see 50 Shades of Grey at an elementary school, surely the reaction would be that this was unacceptable. The debate over whether certain LGBTQIA+ books should be included in libraries wages on throughout the country. Meanwhile, surely there are many who would and have had the same reaction to, say, a prominent display in a public school library of the Bible. Personally, when I saw a copy of a novel by musician and Hawaiian shirt enthusiast Jimmy Buffet at a used book store, my first thought was that this of all books should be burned. All this to say, we cry foul over book bans and book burnings, then move in all directions to ban books. We fear books because of the power we know them to have, and we push books because of that same power.

The Transcendentals, the Human Person, and the Power of Art

To move forward here, a quick digression is needed. Basically, we need a brief understanding of the human person and the person’s relationship to Reality or Being. To try and put simply, we can think of a person as having a mind that is made to know the Truth, a will that is made to do the Good, and a heart that is made to love the Beautiful.

So, there is truth to reality. That truth is what we come to apprehend with our mind, from 2 + 2 = 4 to the notion that Love is something like “willing the good of the other” (Aquinas). These truths shape our mind, the way we see things, the way we understand, and of course, has some effect on our will and heart (if we know it’s better for us to eat beef than ice cream, we may choose to eat meat more often, or if we know that Mozart is considered one of the world’s greatest composers, we may will ourselves to listen to him more until we love him). Ed Feser, the famous Catholic philosopher, has said that through coming to know and understand Aquinas’ famous Five Proofs, he came as an atheist to assent more and more to the Catholic faith and to love it.

There is also goodness to reality. We want to grow a good apple tree, one that bears fruit, and not a bad one that bears no fruit. Or, we see manifestly good actions, virtuous actions, and will to imitate those actions (reading how Christ lived, or even seeing how successful someone was and how they lived to get there). We “do the Good.”

And finally, we love the beautiful. This is quite obvious when you’re a teacher. Of course, a student can be an A student or an F student, knowing or not knowing just about every truth the school has to teach them, but if you make fun of math to either of them, they won’t be much moved. Now, let’s say both the A and the F student are fans of K-Pop. Should you make fun of K-Pop, you will forever lose that student, who will come to despise you, or become incredibly argumentative, or cry. K-Pop has moved their heart. In short, they love it. (Again, there are of course connections–it is highly likely that the point of an education is for the student to actually love things like history as well, it is just harder to get there).

So the power of art is namely this–it most directly and powerfully affects the heart. And the heart is the engine of the entire human person. “My weight is my love,” says St. Augustine. “Wherever I am carried my love is carrying me.”

So if you know someone who doesn’t read history or philosophy or just actively live their life and instead consider the evening news their main source of truth, you may consider that person has a weak mind, or does not know all the things that they ought to know for proper human flourishing. Indeed, that person might become a little strange, talking only of this or that bill or election, being argumentative and testy, and perhaps even the friendship ending should they find out if you voted for someone other than their candidate. In the same way, someone who hasn’t read Dante or Homer, or listened to Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, who doesn’t ever go outside to look at the sun set over the hills, a person for whom the current Top 40 (or worse, AI music) is their main source of beauty, you may consider that person has a weak heart, is not properly attuned to the beautiful, actually loves the wrong things.

Propaganda

Now, this power of art over our love (and therefore, over our entire life) comes loaded also with the fact that art presents worldviews and truth claims. We will focus mainly on truth claims here, as worldview is something that will be more deeply discussed in the next chapter, “Learning to See”.

To put it simply, especially in art that contains language, truth claims are often made. And, these truth claims, when married to art, have a powerful influence over the human person.

Three instances of truth claims within music come to me. The first is the many parties in the 2010s I attended where the song “Young, Wild, and Free” by Wiz Khalifa came over the speakers. People would sing along to the super catchy hook, swaying to the beat, somewhat mesmerized by the druggy, hypnotic spell of the song. The lyrics, of course, go

So what we get drunk?
So what we smoke weed?
We’re just having fun
We don’t care who sees
So what we go out?
That’s how it’s supposed to be
Living young and wild and free

The entire song is a kind of rebuttal to someone who might say you should not do the things that the narrators of the song do. Now, I don’t want to say that everyone who loves and heard that song did all those things that the song encouraged because the song encouraged it. That wouldn’t be true. But the song contains, essentially, truth claims, that doing drugs and partying is simply a natural and even positive part of being young. And certainly this song and the hundreds or even thousands of songs just like it have certainly had a power to convince young people that this is a completely normal–in fact, perhaps the only normal–way for a young person to act.

A second and similar instance happened at a party at a friends house, when the song “F— Donald Trump” came on the stereo. I had never heard the song–I wasn’t a very political college student, and in fact, politics really just annoyed me and seemed more pointless than anything. So imagine my surprise when, it seemed, every single person at the party chanted the hook, “F— Donald Trump,” with a kind of trancelike catharsis. I wonder how many of them could actually name a single policy of Trump’s. The point isn’t that they should either have supported or not supported Trump, but rather, that the song was a piece of political propaganda which created truth claims within art that powerfully effected the people at that party. Not to be cliche, but it was a moment that can only be compared to the “Two Minutes Hate” scene in 1984 where the crowd works themselves into a frenzy while the image of the political enemy, Goldstein, is played on a movie screen.

Tied to this second example is my final example, where, at many concerts, the music was put on pause about halfway through a show so that the musician could deliver a blistering, albeit vague, political screed to the roaring applause of the thousands in the crowd.

The broader topic of propaganda is probably too large to be covered within this series, but suffice to say, if truth claims within art can affect the individual, they can certainly affect the masses, and one should be very careful with any artform that is communicating truth claims, whether music, or movies, or even the evening news, which powerfully uses image and narrative to create entire worldviews for the audience.

Even on an individual level, whose mind hasn’t been changed by a powerful work of art? Say, a child reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and recognizing the evils of racism? This isn’t a negative example–it’s actually largely quite positive. But the problem is, truth claims don’t have to be true–they can in fact be vicious lies. And a vicious lie combined with a work of art creates a brew between the head and the heart so potent that it’s not easily, if ever, undone.

The Truth of Fiction

Now fiction, as an artform built on words, has incredible powers to make truth claims. In the spectrum of fiction to philosophy, there are many works, like George Orwell’s, or C.S. Lewis’, that are something of a perfect blend between the two–great works of art that also contain many powerful philosophical points that the author seems intent on communicating to the audience and even convincing them of. Even pretty bad art can be quite convincing. No one is claiming Uncle Tom’s Cabin as anything like a literary masterpiece, but we all learned in school how important a tool it was to convince the nation that slavery was a grave evil.

The Aeneid is another example of art that is, in a sense, propaganda. It is, in effect, trying to create a unifying narrative of Rome and the Roman people as descendants of Troy and eternal enemies of Carthage. And yet it is, perhaps more importantly, a tremendously beautiful work of art.

In fiction, it is often the case with these types of philosophical works that characters symbolize or represent certain ideas. So in Black Panther, Black Panther represents Dr. Martin Luther King’s ideas of a world where race doesn’t matter and that people are all treated as brothers and sisters, while Killmonger represents Malcolm X’s more violent brand of Black superiority. In the end, Black Panther recognizes the righteousness of Killmonger’s anger while rejecting his notions that the Wakandans (themselves representative of Black people everywhere, though perhaps especially in America as an American movie) should dominate all other life on Earth. The movie–wildly entertaining, surprisingly emotional–is also making grand philosophical points through using its characters as stand-ins for ideas. Or in Beauty and the Beast, Belle represents all young women, beautiful and lovely, though perhaps a tad naive to the world and to how love actually works. Beast represents all young men, unaware of how rudely and brashly they behave and the negative effects that has on those around them. The two then fall in love and complete each other–Belle becoming a bit more realistic and centered, Beast becoming a bit more civilized and gentle. It is “a tale as old as time,” representing all true love stories.

Other times, worldbuilding is used to communicate ideas, most obviously in Utopias and Dystopias like Herland (in which a trio of men discover a utopian land of only women), 1984 (about a perfectly complete reign of an authoritarian government), and Brave New World (about a world where science and eugenics and hedonism has come to completely dictate the masses of humanity). Dante’s comedy, about the afterlife and the kind of people in it, works in a similar way. In these stories the worldbuilding does the heavy lifting on the philosophical front, and the story and characters are there to basically move through that world for the reader to see how it functions and how it affects the people within it.

Other times, the truth claims lie in the dialogue or interiority of the character, like in The Brothers Karamazov or Anna Karenina. Or it is in the narrator’s own commentary on the story, like in Middlemarch or Slaughterhouse-Five or War and Peace, which ends, preposterously, with a fifty or so page essay on the nature of history and free will. Or in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, people make all sorts of verbal arguments as to why the main character, the now-sainted  Franz Jägerstätter, should simply fight for the Nazis, while Franz, unable to put together any sort of logical argument, proves them wrong simply in how he lives a good life.

Or it can happen on a symbolic level. I think of a Bluey episode that is completely wordless. It is raining, and Bluey, a little girl, wants to play a completely arbitrary and childlike game out in the rain. Chili, her mom, wants to stay inside. Playing in the rain symbolically represents childlike joy, while staying inside symbolically represents adult concerns. The two are in constant conflict throughout the episode. At the end, Chili finally goes out into the rain–but with an umbrella. She is still symbolically holding on to adult cares. But, at the very end, to fully participate in Bluey’s game, she actually loses the umbrella, using it for Bluey’s game rather than to protect herself from the rain. So on a symbolic level, childlike joy and wonder is shown to be ultimately superior to adult cares and concerns. Similarly, in the novella A Christmas Carol, each Ghost looks a certain way, with each detail of their appearance having symbolic bearing on the Past, the Present, or the Future. So the Ghost of Christmas Past is a candle that flickers and constantly changes shape and appearance, like how the past can look many different ways to us at different times, a sad memory becoming ultimately a happy one because of where it led, and so on.

And of course, the truth claims always lie in the ways the story plays out, whether a character’s life ends happily or tragically, like how Rocky posits that romantic love is of higher value than worldly success, which we see when Rocky loses the fight but embraces Adrian. Or in Finding Nemo, where Marlin learns to let Nemo live his life a little more freely, while Nemo learns to respect and love his father more. Or in Brave New World, where the new world is ultimately destructive even to the best of men from the old world, essentially arguing that this new technocracy will destroy all of Western culture. Or in Macbeth and Anna Karenina, where we see that evil is in fact evil and is ultimately destructive to those who engage with it.

So fiction can contain more explicit truth claims. In the next chapter, we will see how all fiction, even seemingly non-philosophical fiction, contains a worldview, and how the truth or falseness of that presented worldview makes or breaks art.

Obviously, recognizing these things takes some level of education to learn how to spot them. But even if someone can’t spot them, they are affected nevertheless. You can probably guess the genre of music a person likes just by seeing how they dress, whether or not they could articulate the truth claims within the music they listen to. Again, this is because art affects us not just on the level of the mind, but on the deeper and even more powerful level of the heart.

Beauty and Truth

Truth, then, especially these sorts of more direct philosophical truth claims, can be seen as nearly co-primary with the attempt to make a story (or other work of art) beautiful. With that said, beauty should always be seen as the primary objective, with truth claims being sacrificed before beauty. The alternative, when beauty (or to put another way, simply good storytelling) is abandoned in order to make a point, terrible things happen. Look no further than the moment in Avengers: Endgame when, in the climax, seemingly the entire story is put aside in order to make the point, basically, that women are badass and awesome. Here, something like ten or more female superheroes converge, out of nowhere, to take the Infinity Gauntlet and carry it, a still from which is pictured below:

Artful storytelling has here been sacrificed for the sake of making a point, and the whole work suffers as a result. It would have been better either that this point was incorporated more naturally into the plot and character arcs, or that it was cut altogether to preserve the story itself, whether or not every single point the author wanted to make was made.

This same mistake is repeated often, and leads to art that is often called “preachy”. Meaning, namely, it has put its message, communicating its message, above telling a compelling story. So characters, plots, and so on, suffer or are manipulated for the sake of the message. Think of God’s Not Dead, infamous for its preachiness, or many famous movies and tv shows today, which push political messages or cultural messages, often doing serious harm or flat-out ruining their stories as a result. The point isn’t that any of these things have untrue messages, though certainly some or even many of them do–the point is simply that any message, even the best and truest message, will ruin a story if communicating that message takes precedence over simply telling a good story.

So a beginner should focus on beauty, knowing that truth is there as well and can be included alongside beauty. A deeper, contemplative truth that is married more naturally to beauty will be explored in the next chapter.

It is St. Thomas’ teaching that “beauty relates to a cognitive power.” But beauty is not simply the same as the true which also relates to a cognitive power. Nor is beauty the same simply as the good. The good is that which simply satisfies the appetite. The beautiful is that which gives satisfaction through its contemplation. From these factors we can formulate the following distinctions among the true, the good, and the beautiful.

-Rev. Robert E. McCall, S.J.J.

A Trip to the Museum

I was at a museum–I can’t remember which–when I stumbled upon something rather strange. The Middle Ages section of the museum was placed directly beside the Modern section with really no break between them, so that on the left you had this wonderful tapestry:

A pretty amazing work. Detailed, sharp, of its time and place but also totally pleasing to look at still today. Anyone can see the beauty of it, the skill of the artist, the care that it took to make.

Juxtaposed to this tapestry, on the right, in the modern section, the first painting one saw was this drawing of a cat:

It’s difficult, when looking at this, to think of anything to say except the old cliche, found in the children’s book Olivia when the title character sees a Jackson Pollack in a museum: “I could do that in about five minutes.” Only here, one would think instead, “I could do that in about five seconds.” There’s very little good to say about it, except that it’s somewhat clever that something recognizable as a cat can be drawn with a single line, the pencil never leaving the paper. But if this were found hanging on a refrigerator, it would make much more sense than it hanging in a museum, especially next to a tapestry of such elegant design.

This example is one of many that could have been drawn of the predicament with art in our world. And it isn’t simply in museums or between the pages of a book where a modern person encounters this phenomenon. It’s in our classrooms, in our houses, in our airports, in our buildings and our city design. Where cities once were made for people to walk through, perhaps on their way to the market or the church, and were designed so that they were enjoyable to walk through because of their beauty, the modern city is essentially a place of commerce, with streets designed in rigid grids so that people who live there can easily travel from one place of commerce to another, buying and selling and producing, with very little thought given to how a person should live outside of their times of work.

Can we name this predicament? Is there a core of the problem that can be identified? Yes, indeed, it is right in front of our noses. We stare at it all day, every day (that is, when we aren’t staring at a screen instead).

We have abandoned beauty.

We have abandoned it to the destruction of art, and moreso, to the destruction of ourselves–of artists and those who wish to see art, that is to say, everyone. I don’t mean to say that these two juxtaposed works–the beautiful tapestry from the Middle Ages and the ugly drawing of the cat from the 20th century–prove that this is true. Rather, they are merely examples of something everyone who is paying attention at a museum, or in a library, or listening to music, has recognized and either spoken aloud or thought quietly in their heart of hearts. Something has gone quite wrong, indeed.

Trapped Within the Cave

This is the start of understanding how to be a writer in our world–knowing that our contemporary world has abandoned what once made art great, namely, the pursuit of capturing the Beautiful in some material form, whether that be a tapestry, a drawing, a book, a poem, a song, or any other artform. I start here because it’s where we all start, because it’s the water we are all swimming in, and unless someone is shown that they can actually swim upstream, or even hop out of the water onto dry land, the artist will simply go with the contemporary notions of art, accepting them as basic fact.

The contemporary notion is some form of this–Beauty does not exist. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is simply a matter of taste. Beauty is whatever makes us feel good. I will get into explorations of defining “Beauty” in the next chapter. For now, I’d like to see how we got here. This will necessarily involve some broad sweeps, but the hope is to provide a framework and some answers that, if the reader so chooses, can be explored further on one’s own. I don’t intend this to be something only PhDs can read, but rather, a beginner fiction writer.

In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Socrates lays out his basic understanding of reality. In summary, there are two levels to reality–on one level, the material world, things we can see, touch, smell, as well as things that can’t ever be known fully or with utter certainty, such as political opinions, scientific knowledge, and the like–and then a second level, a level of true knowledge of eternal, perennial truths, things like Justice and Love and Goodness and Beauty. This second level is far more important to learn and understand than the first, because it contains certain, knowable truths, and the more we learn of these things, and these immaterial truths actually affect and impress themselves on the material world. The more we come to understand this second level of things outside the Cave, the more we come to understand the nature of reality itself (the Sun, the form of the Good in the allegory, that by which all the perennial truths are seen). This special type of knowledge we call “Wisdom”.

By way of example, perhaps we see a friend in a romantic relationship. We see that they are being mistreated, abused even, and we say “That isn’t love.” Well, how is it that we come to say that? We come to say it because we have a higher understanding of what “love” is, “love” as a perennial, unchanging form, and we see that our friend, who is constantly emotionally blackmailed, does not have a relationship of love with their romantic partner. We have judged something in the cave (our friend’s relationship and whether or not it is one of love) only because we have journeyed out of the cave and gleaned some understanding of what true love really is. This is how reality works. We must have an understanding of universal truths to understand the nature of particular events and things.

This basic understanding of the two levels of reality persisted and was developed until William of Ockham and Renee Descartes. Without getting lost in the weeds, I will try to say simply and truly, that where the Ancients through the Medievals believed that we could come to understand universal truths, Ockham and Descartes started a completely new conception of reality, one which said, basically, that we cannot, that universal truths likely do not exist, and if they do, we certainly can never know them. Whether or not it’s what these men intended is not within the scope of this book. The only thing that can be said here is that it is what happened.

This philosophical shift, combined with things like the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the slow shift toward focus on the individuals interior life rather than the life of the community, a slow slide away from faith, the scientific revolution which seemingly allowed us to alter the rules of reality itself, and other things besides, are what have made for Modernity and this modern predicament of having completely lost Beauty.

In our day, with the influence of Modern philosophers like Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzche, Sartre, and the rest, we have now arrived in a place where to make a claim like “Beauty is objective–some things are more beautiful than others” is either interpreted immediately as completely false OR is interpreted as the speaker saying “I think that beauty is objective” or “I think that this movie is better than that movie, but you may think otherwise, and that’s all ok because we are only speaking of our subjective tastes and perceptions.” Indeed, if you were to push forward and say, as I have done in the past, “No, that movie is objectively bad,” you will likely anger everyone and help no one. I don’t really recommend it. Or at least, I recommend doing so with more love and tact than that.

“Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics.”

– AJ Ayer

This modern situation is what C.S. Lewis so brilliantly detailed in one of his masterpieces, The Abolition of Man. We have come to a place where, since objectivity is impossible, we largely cannot communicate about higher things. Every truth statement is interpreted by the hearer as a subjective statement. “This movie is beautiful” is interpreted as “I think this movie is really good” or “This movie moved me emotionally.” Communication is really only possible on the meeting ground of reality. Unless we can all communicate on that common meeting ground, we are merely little boats that occasionally collide, but largely are drifting on an uncaring, violent, incomprehensible sea.

Alternatively, if we cannot know universal, unchanging truths, all we can grasp at are material truths, things within the cave itself. Thus our obsession with politics, with science, with the evening news, with all sorts of lower, uncertain, or changing knowledge. Modern philosophy traps us in the cave. And it makes mankind into nothing better than lunatic cavemen trying their best to dominate one another.

The Classical and the Contemporary Artist

And this is where we find the contemporary artist. He knows for certain that beauty does not exist, is merely in the eye of the beholder. He has been told this his entire life, so it must be true. He knows that the most important aspect of art is self-expression, or uniqueness, or novelty, or political or rhetorical power. This is how he has been taught literature in school–the artist has a message that must be interpreted, and this is the core of what art is, a kind of mysterious, puzzle-like essay. He has seen (perhaps, if he has been lucky in education or curious) some examples of the Great Works and maybe finds them cold, intimidating, severe. He has seen more contemporary work, and it seems fun, approachable, unique, doable. He knows that of course art can’t be judged objectively, but he’d sure like people in mass to subjectively like his work more than they like other people’s work, but he isn’t sure how to do that. Or, he thinks his work must be politically persuasive, pushing the world closer and closer to the Socialist Utopia of his dreams. His paradigm of art and of the world are completely that of modernity. He likely doesn’t realize there is another way, one that would ask him to leave the cave for a place in the sun. Only dead fish follow the stream, and this artist is dead and not likely to find life, what with college to get into, a career to find, social media constantly updating, a new political fiasco every day, podcast after daily podcast covering said political fiasco, and on and on. He churns out work that is praised as new, exciting, a bold step forward, and that, at best, will be considered dated, hokey, and old-fashioned in another ten years, a symptom of its time, important but not loveable.

Perhaps, as an artist, or someone wondering if they are called to make art, you have felt the call of beauty in spite of being beaten over the head with the talk that beauty isn’t real. You can’t help but notice the sunset over the low fields, or the way the lines “And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep” affect you, or have found that no, that movie everyone likes really is no good after all. Quite likely, you’ve loved some works of art and felt that other people must or should love the same thing. A novel that tore you open. A song that rocked your world. This is a great beginning–you are climbing out of the cave. Climb on!

So what did the ancient and medieval artists have that the contemporary artist does not? Why can one see the tapestry at the start of the chapter and still be amazed by it while feeling totally alienated by, say, the now-infamous banana duct-taped to the wall at Art Basel? The point is this–everything. They had everything, inside the cave and out, matter and form, opinion and truth, fable and mystery, belief and faith, and we have none of it, or only parts, but not the whole. A pre-modern artist was concerned with creating something beautiful, something harmonious, something that married the past to the present, something that expressed eternity. They shared the same reality with those who would see their work, so they could be confident that, say, their painting of Christ walking on the water would be understand and appreciated in all its nuance of expression, or that their tapestry of a hunt in the woods would be recognizable to prince and peasant alike. They shared the same reality with everyone else (certainly at the height of Christendom), and their art was able to flourish as a result. It could be loved for its beauty. The artist now must be content with their placard beside their painting, which explains the inner workings of the artist’s mind when creating their incomprehensible nightmare work.

“At the sight of beauty, wings grow on the human soul.”

– Plato

Moreover, the audience then, anyone who encounters the typical modern work, is either left scratching their head and laughing in a puzzled way, or is left thinking of a political message that the art communicated to them, happy to now be convinced a bit more that their revolution is worthwhile. In an art gallery, a person has to read the placards for ancient, medieval, and modern work, because we’re completely lost in the sea of history, unaware of where we came from or what other modern people are thinking and saying. Most of the time at a museum is spent puzzling over placards. What the modern audience does not receive, what they are shut off from, what they are discouraged to do, is actively rest in the beauty of a great work of art.

I don’t mean to be overly-critical of modern artists. Many of them likely have the potential to create great work, but their philosophies, really ideologies, are like Pagan idols, and the artists have become like them. With the correct–meaning true, the only right metric–philosophy, they likely could create great works. This is the reason for including the philosophical section first. One has to get off on the right foot.

So the way forward for the beginner writer is this: recognize the modern predicament, and realize that the way forward is the way upward. We must understand beauty once again. There are many things that need to happen to right the ship of our world, but as a fiction writer, beauty and all it entails are your concern. It is your duty and your birthright.