The 3rd thing I wanted to write was that when a man is put in the
necessity of choosing between an act which is clearly beneficial to
others, but with the thwarting of the demands of conscience (the
will of God), then the problem is only one of short-sightedness,
because the man sees in the immediate future the good which will
arise from his act, if he thwarts the will of God, but he does not
see in the more remote future the other good, which is an infinite
number of times greater, which will come from the abstention of
this act and the fulfilment of the will of God. It is the same kind
of thing that children do, destroying the general order of a house
which is necessary for their own happiness, for the sake of the
immediate pleasure of play.
The fact is that for the work of God and for man accomplishing the
work of God, time does not exist. Man can not but represent to himself
everything in time, and therefore in order to correctly judge of the
importance of the work of God, he has to represent it to himself in
the very remote future, even in infinite time. The fact, that I will
not kill the murderer and will forgive him, that I shall die unseen
by any one, fulfilling the will of God, will bear its own fruit ...
if I insist upon thinking in terms of time--in infinite time. But
it will bear its fruit surely.
I have to finish the former:
4) Refinement and power in art are almost always diametrically
opposed.
5) Is it true that works of art are obtained by assiduous work? That
which we call a work of art--yes. But is it real art?
6) The Japanese sang and we could not restrain ourselves from
laughter. If we had sung before the Japanese they would have laughed.
The more so had Beethoven been played for them. Indian and Greek
temples are understood by all. And Greek statues are understood
by all. And our best painting is also understandable. So that
architecture, sculpture, painting, having reached their perfection,
have reached also cosmopolitanism, accessibility to all. To the same
point in some of its manifestations has the art of speech reached;
in the teaching of Buddha, of Christ, in the poetry of Sakia-Muni,
Jacob, Joseph. In dramatic art; Sophocles, Aristophanes did not
reach it. It is being reached in the new ones. But in music they
have been lagging behind entirely. The ideal of all art to which
it should strive is accessibility to all--but it, especially music
to-day, noses its way into refinement.
7) The principal thing which I wanted to say about art, is that it
does not exist in the sense of some great manifestation of the human
spirit as it is understood now. There is play, consisting in the
beauty of construction, in sculpting figures, or in representing
objects, in dancing, in singing, in playing on various instruments,
in poetry, in fables, in stories, but all this is only play and
not an important matter to which one could consciously devote his
strength.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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