Uselessness

As for me I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a air or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations. The solace of such work as I do with with brain and heart lies in this - that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked, and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil its true potential - the imagination.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, Faber and Faber, 2009