Carolina QuotesPerhaps it's good for one to suffer. ... Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Ch. 5
- work
- Antic Hay (1923)
- year
- 1923
Cite this record
“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. ... Can an artist do an…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-49900374D2. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/49900374d2
More from Aldous Huxley
Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. We begin by lacking charity towards Nature, so that instead of trying to co-operate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and subhuman levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth's mineral resources, ruin its soil, ravage its forests, pour filth into its rivers and poisonous fumes into its air. From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art--a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place. And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness in regard to the human beings who have to perform the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass production and mass distribution. With mass-production and mass-distribution go mass-financing, and the three have conspired to expropriate ever-increasing numbers of small owners of land and productive equipment, thus reducing the sum of freedom among the majority and increasing the power of the minority to exercise a coercive control over the lives of their fellows.
It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'
At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse