The world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology, the bottleneck is really in art.
“By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.”
But it seems to me that most of the human beings whose lives have stirred us and whom we admire are people who dedicated themselves not to the elementary pleasures, but to something noble, something fine, something that reaches beyond. Some encounter with necessity is the ground of taking one’s life seriously. It’s the ground of being sensitive to all of the really beautiful things in the world. It’s the ground of being open to the call of something higher in which we have a chance to participate, whether it be perpetuation of our young, whether it be the future of our country, whether it be the arts or philosophy or music. And it’s the ground, really, of transforming what is otherwise a mere necessity into an occasion of something really splendidly human.
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.