A plea for the arts

Whenever we begin to contemplate a plea for the arts, a complex obstacle immediately arises: artists have a bad habit of being resilient. It's this resilience that makes us mistakenly believe that the best of this art vaguely ends up being accomplished, anyway, and that the «pinnacle» of that best vaguely lasts, anyway. The prevailing idea among the public and even in academia is that nothing - neither social nor personal catastrophe - interrupts the progress and production of beautiful, powerful works of art. Chaucer wrote in the midst of the plague. James Joyce and Edvart Munch continued with a blind eye and a diminished eye respectively. French authors excelled in an era they defined, writing in the 1940s under Nazi occupation. The greatest of composers knew how to carry on despite being deaf. The artists fought madness, illness, scarcity and the humiliation of exile (political, cultural, religious) to do their work. Accustomed to their grief, their tenacious capacity for grief and their astonishing perseverance in spite of it, we sometimes forget that what they do exists in spite of affliction, not because of it.

Toni Morrison The source of self-esteem