The Louvre is an absolutely beautiful museum. It is well worth the visit and you could devote days to exploring every nook and crevice. It is known for the Mona Lisa (which was far smaller in person), but there are so many gems worth exploring like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or one of Monet’s pieces. Even beyond art there was a gorgeous scultpture garden and a room dedicated to the royal jewels. It requires several days to fully walk through the museum, but to actually appreciate everything it holds easily requires weeks.
“By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”
I have always held a special penchant for art and what it represents. Of course it is pretty to look at, but I think the concept behind art is equally as fascinating. I love to view it from the lens of one of my favorite books, The Things They Carry by Tim O’Brien. It is a quasi-fiction/nonfiction book about a soldier’s experience in the Vietnam War. It is a well written story about war, but it is also an exploration into the nature of truth. The novel is told by an unreliable narrator who often contradicts himself or flat out lies about what happens at different sections of the book. This seems strange, but O’Brien does this to convey the idea that sometimes a lie can tell the truth better than reality. If I tell you a story and it makes you feel the way I want you to feel, isn’t it true on some level? His format fits especially for war because that is the sort of experience you can never truly communicate to someone that hasn’t been through it. So, O’Brien settles with making you understand the emotion and message of the story even if that requires lying about what specifically happened. Objective truth matters less than the feelings evoked from a story. The Things They Carried is one of the most honest books I have ever read, despite little of it being true.
“It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”
This concept is so fascinating to me because it applies to everything. Art is the easiest way to see. For hundreds of years painters were aspiring to paint something that was as close to realistic as possible. With the invention of cameras this became pointless. Painters began experimenting with how they could represent the world in different ways. I love impressionism for this exact reason. Monet’s Haystacks, End of Summer (right) may not be a perfect representation of what he saw, but instead they capture what he felt. He is communicating how nature makes him feel through the sweeping brushstrokes and vivid colors. In this way, I think his painting is a truer representation than a photograph. It captures a moment and makes it timeless. A photograph seems to make everything seem stagnant and still, but a painting has the ability to bring something to life. Impressionism does this more than any other type of art (in my opinion). I feel like O’Brien would admire this era of painting for the same reason.
Books are an obvious extension as well. Reading has the irreplaceable ability to put you into a new world. Movies show you one, but in a book you are an active participant in this world. As a result, they serve as powerful ways to make you feel something. A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables are incredibly moving stories. Does Sydney Carton’s sacrifice become less meaningful because he is a figment of Dicken’s imagination? Is Jean Valjean’s story of redemption rendered less consequential because it never happened? I am sure thousands of lives have been changed by these characters and their actions. When you lose the shackles of reality, you have the freedom to go wherever you want. You can create a world of your own, just as Dickens and Hugo did. Reality is so fickle that we need these artistic expressions to open up our eyes. They bypass pure logic and reasoning to get to the heart of something. They are our means of breaking down this crazy and confusing world into something understandable. Art (in whatever form) allows us to communicate with the world. I love science and math, but if we don’t have the creativity and ingenuity to explore and manipulate our world they mean nothing.