ART QUOTE OF THE DAY . . .

[S]tyle for the writer, no less than color for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualititative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual.
--Marcel Proust
The quote is from Proust's Narrator in Time Regained, pg. 299--not something regurgitated from the Internet, but something I read this morning as I near my goal of making it all the way through In Search of Lost Time. (A somewhat pretentious thing to disclose on a Monday morning, I'm aware, but I'm beyond help . . .)
The quote continues after another sentence I left out: "Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."
Maybe that's why I majored in English Literature as an undergraduate, and have had a serious art habit ever since. (Meanwhile, I'm still searching for an explanation as to why I went to law school . . . )
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