Art at times waits for Life to catch up with itself.
It must slow down and cultivate patience.
If it chooses to go solo and marches off
on its own, it becomes a grim specter-image
of its stolid worldly original…
though “stolid” only in the sense of the latter’s
cocksure notion that it IS the original
on whose happy largesse the former feeds.
Hence, those Tolstoyan renunciations that mark
such moments at which Art capitulates to Life
altogether, with nothing left to say
except “the illusion was just an illusion” –
a trivial prank that Life will play on itself
under certain sets of circumstances.
Art rarely concedes willingly. Nor does it now.
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