What Is Culture For - School of Life

Gems

"Strangely, it appears that certain imaginary friends drawn from culture can end up feeling more real and in that sense more present to us than any of our real-life acquaintances, even if they have been dead a few centuries and lived on another continent. We can feel honored to count them as among our best friends."
"There's a strange contrast we sometimes catch sight of around parents and children. The child might be joyfully singing and dancing along to a favorite song. As they watch, the parent's delight has a different quality: they are deeply conscious of how fragile and fleeting such moments of intense happiness are; they see this lovely, innocent moment against the backdrop of life's sorrows and troubles — adding a layer of poignancy and tenderness which the child can't as yet imagine. And this is what makes the sight so moving to the parent."
"'When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.' The clarity won't make the lover return; but it will do the next best thing: help us to feel less confused by, and alone with, the misery of having been left."

"Rather than focus on what a work of art might tell us about the time and place it was made or about the person who created it, we should develop the confidence to do exactly that which we might feel discouraged to do: relate cultural masterpieces to our own dilemmas and pains."

"The legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are."
"Art can, for adults, function as more sophisticated versions of transitional objects. What we are at heart looking for in friendship is not necessarily someone we can touch and see in front of us, but a person who shares, and can help us develop, our sensibility and our values."
"Strangely, it appears that certain imaginary friends drawn from culture can end up feeling more real and in that sense more present to us than any of our real-life acquaintances, even if they have been dead a few centuries and lived on another continent. We can feel honored to count them as among our best friends."
"Confronted by the many failings of our real life communities, culture gives us the option of assembling a tribe for ourselves, drawing its members from across the widest ranges of time and space, blending some living friends with some dead authors, architects, musicians and composers, painters and poets."
"So we can confront the difficult stretches of existence not simply on the basis of our own small resources, but accompanied by the accumulated wisdom of the kindest, most intelligent voices of all ages gone by."

"There's a strange contrast we sometimes catch sight of around parents and children. The child might be joyfully singing and dancing along to a favorite song. As they watch, the parent's delight has a different quality: they are deeply conscious of how fragile and fleeting such moments of intense happiness are; they see this lovely, innocent moment against the backdrop of life's sorrows and troubles — adding a layer of poignancy and tenderness which the child can't as yet imagine. And this is what makes the sight so moving to the parent."
In defense of sweet / sentimental art
- "It's because we're burdened with frustrations, disappointments, failings, errors, regrets and compromises that the sight of grace, innocence, lightness and carefree joy is so moving; and if we cry it is because we're glimpsing something we love and need and yet cannot now hold on to."

Helpful framing of art: art is produced to supply us with what we lack emotionally, thus helping us achieve emotional balance. Art that does this is considered beautiful. Since everyone has different emotional shortages, everyone has different tastes in art.
Film can educate us by example, and deliver a balancing view to what we're missing. That's why there's so many genre of film.
"Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional makeup lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis."

Nice advocacy for the Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina, and how novels like that develop our powers of sympathy by showing how unfortunate characters can get there, step by step.

Literate is a reality simulation which teaches us what befalls us if we behave in certain ways. Or more generally, what humanity is like.
"'When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.' The clarity won't make the lover return; but it will do the next best thing: help us to feel less confused by, and alone with, the misery of having been left."

Architecture: "the most imposing of the arts."
- "In the company of the right building (as in the company of the right friend) we find it easier to become the better versions of who we really are."
"The Parliament building in Dhaka, like many a beautiful city, street, chair or teapot, matters because of its skill at encouraging the better sides of us."

"[We] are prone to racing through the years while forgetting the wonder, fragility and beauty of existence. It's fortunate, therefore, that we have art."
Art is a form of advertising to remind us of what is good and beautiful
- "If advertising images carry a lot of the blame for instilling a sickness in our souls, the images of artists reconcile us with our realities and reawaken us to the genuine, but too-easily forgotten, value of our lives."
"Art doesn't have to tantalize us with alluring visions of things we can never attain. It's capable of drawing our admiration to the easily forgotten, but very real, charms and dignity of everyday life."

Concerning grand scenes of nature, "We regain composure not by being made to feel more important, but by being reminded of the minuscule and momentary nature of everyone and everything."