Currently reading Sheila Heti’s Pale Colour, so I thought I’d share a selection of my favorite quotes from Part I.
On the purpose of art.
What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence—for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?
Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence. People were finally beginning to catch on. Our rage made perfect sense.
[…] Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions.
I love the idea of art as a second draft of existence. Art isn’t intrinsically valuable in a capitalist system. It’s not about maximizing productivity. Rather, it’s fundamentally a human activity, as much as breathing and eating and sleeping. That’s why I think AI will never succeed in displacing humans as the source of art is because art, as Heti writes, is fundamentally tied to the human experience.
On attraction.
With a few people in one’s life, too much happens emotionally—more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. Mira felt this way about Annie. It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one—and isn’t that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life?
But the deeper question was: What was one supposed to do with such people? Fuck them, love them, or leave them alone? Yet they seemed to call out to be acted upon.
In life, there are no sure signs of whether a woman is the one you are supposed to stay away from, or the one you’re supposed to love.
A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face. Did God think of this when he was making the world? Why didn’t he give everyone the exact same face?
Love is a strange thing. It seems so simple. Often it can be. But then it can also feel utterly agonizing, bewildering, complex. Sigh.
On memory.
As the past cooled, it changed states. It had once been a solid, then it became a gas. Or it had been a gas first, then it became a liquid, and she was left holding the muck of it in her hands.
Attention is an increasingly scarce commodity, gobbled up by the algorithms. We’re trapped in a cage of ever-shrinking content, endless scrolling, and vanishing hours. Maybe that’s why this passage resonated so much with me, because it describes how I feel about my memory in the digital age — it’s as if it’s just filtering through my hands, no matter how hard I try to patch the cracks.
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