This is one of those annoying conversations where I agree with everyone and I’m still trying to assimilate all of my feelings and come up with something coherent and consistent.
I’ve got a friend who thinks that Art (capital A- VERY important) is the be all and end all to life. (She’s also got some strange and disturbing ideas about utopia, but I digress.) She was going on and on about how a utopian civilization is one which produces Art, and that is its aim. And I was like, well, I’ll agree with you possibly that art is a symptom of a healthy civilization, but the be all and end all? The end result? That doesn’t make sense, because if there’s truly all of that art, but no other kinds of advances, then the civilization is nowhere.
However, we were also discussing Oscar Wilde’s belief that there is no such thing as right or wrong literature or moral or immoral literature- just good writing and bad writing. To my surprise, I found that to an extent, I did agree with that. I have obviously and definitely enjoyed books which I would definitely call Art, and then thought back on it and been, like, “wow, that was really, really strange. And I disagree with every sing thought, sentiment, and idea the author smuggled into that book. But,” and I would finish, “that was still REALLY good.” And it’s not a contradiction. The pleasure is aesthetic AND objective- I see an author taking a position, or documenting someone else’s position, and doing it WELL. And that’s the pleasure in reading- seeing the Art in how the author expresses ideas. You know how many LotR knock-offs there are? They’ll never be considered as good as LotR because Tolkien was a genius with words who made his story into something truly magical (even if, IMHO, it got a bit shleppy towards the end of Two Towers).
And that’s why I feel, at least a bit, that I can put Torah views in one part of my brain, the dominant part, and also take in things which are not necessarily in sync. Because Art is not the ending point of a great civilization, it is a medium, a symptom. Art is the composition of a story, not only the story itself, and I can be in awe of Terry Pratchett’s style without agreeing with what I see as his agnosticism.
Anyway. I hope I made sense. I have no idea what possessed me to write all this, but for what it’s worth…