Refuel Your Spirit
Lesson 7: Seek Pleasure (2 of 3)
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
(William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”)
Words. Just words. Hardly more than one hundred of them. And yet think of the power of those words. They helped sustain Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. Helped sustain American POWs in Vietnam. Helped sustain civil rights heroes as they fought for equality.
Human beings need spiritual fuel. We have no instincts, including no survival instinct. We have to continually stoke the flames of our desire to live and our commitment to taking the actions life requires. Recall Ayn Rand’s statement, which I cited in Lesson 1.
Just as man’s physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by “soul,” I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life worth living. He is born without the knowledge of either. He has to discover both—and translate them into reality—and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.
To shape the world and ourselves in the image of our values means to work to create our ideal self and our ideal world. To envision the best possible and to strive to bring it into existence. But how do we envision the ideal? How do we keep it real to ourselves in the midst of our daily trials and tribulations? When we are knocked down by obstacles, how do we summon the desire to get back up and try again? When we are overwhelmed by the ugliness we see in the media, how do we remind ourselves that what really matters in life—what’s really important—isn’t the latest scandal or the latest tragedy, but achievement, virtue, happiness, love?
We turn to art.
Man’s search for meaning
The physical world around us is rich in meaning. Bright color and light represent energy. The outdoors represents freedom. Candy stores represent abundance. An upright posture represents pride and virtue. Across cultures, our emotional language is tied to the physical in predictable ways. To be sad is to feel blue. To experience joy is to feel light. Elation comes from the Latin elatus, which means elevated—raised up.
None of this is arbitrary. In her book Joyful, Ingrid Fetell Lee writes about the way that everyday places and objects can evoke intense emotions, and how this has its roots in our nature as evolved beings. The bright lights and colors that energize us, she argues, are in nature indications of literal energy in the form of calorie-dense food. Or take our love of harmony and symmetry. Lee writes:
Putting objects with similar features together taps into a principle of gestalt psychology called similarity, which says that the brain tends to perceive similar objects as a group. The individual feathers or leaves or toys cease to be seen as independent objects. Instead, they become modules in a larger composition. According to gestalt theorists, the brain does this to simplify and make sense of information coming in through the visual system. After all, similar objects often have a practical relationship to one another, not just a visual one. A group of similar leaves likely belongs to the same plant, and it’s simpler to look at a forest and see a hundred trees rather than millions of individual leaves. According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pleasurable “aha!” sensation we feel when we see related objects as a group suggests that the brain’s processes for identifying objects may be intrinsically connected to the reward mechanisms in the limbic system. In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.
As conceptual beings who survive by viewing existents as units—as members of a group of similar members—we experience pleasure in viewing things as units. In seeing “like with like,” we experience the joy of a well-organized world, which evokes the immeasurable value of a well-organized mind.
Wherever we look, we see what is—but we can also see more than what is. A while back, I was watching a baseball game. My favorite team, the Philadelphia Phillies, was down by one in the final inning of a game against division rivals, the Atlanta Braves. They were down to their last out when a young man stepped to the plate. Luke Williams was playing in his second professional game—the first start of his career. With one man on, and all the pressure in the world on his back, he hit a towering home run to left to win the game.
My reaction—and the reactions of countless other Phillies fans—went far deeper than the joy of winning a single baseball game. Many of us were brought to tears as we witnessed a moment of triumph against great odds. We witnessed a young man live though a moment he had been dreaming about, hoping for, struggling for, his entire life—and we saw the joy on his face, and his teammates’ faces, and his family’s faces, and we felt: this is the stuff of life.
Human beings have the ability to find deeper meaning in the objects and events around us. A home run isn’t just a home run but a story about grit and perseverance. A building isn’t just shelter but a monument to human ingenuity. A smile isn’t just a smile but a testament to innocence, or joy, or seduction. These things and moments crystalize our abstract values, make them tangible and real, bring them down to earth so that we can experience them with an immediacy that otherwise eludes us. It is one thing to value courage—it is another thing to watch a lone man in Tiananmen Square confront a line of oncoming tanks.
Sometimes, as with Luke Williams’s home run, the meaning of a moment hits you over the head. It forces itself on you. You’re overcome with emotion and may not even know why. “It’s just a baseball game. Why am I crying?” But you can also prime yourself for such moments, cultivate them, actively pursue them. You do this through the act of contemplation.
To contemplate is to pause on something, to seek its deeper meaning. To contemplate is to take the concrete and ask yourself what it conveys about life. Poet Sylvia Plath eloquently described the act of contemplation in a diary entry:
On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonymous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.
From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquility that comes from dwelling among primal things.
Contemplation is not a wasteful activity. It is a vital one. It serves two purposes—one mental, one emotional. Mentally, you need to be able to experience your abstract ideas and values as if they were perceptual concretes. Only concretes exist, and for you to be able to keep your abstractions tied to reality, you need to be able to experience them as if they were concretes. Emotionally, contemplation can give you the experience of living in your ideal world. The world where your values are not out there in the future, waiting to be achieved, but where they have been achieved, here and now. Where the work of living is done—if only for a moment.
Though you can gain some of these mental and emotional benefits from contemplating objects and events, there is only one field of human endeavor designed to concretize your deepest ideas and values and refuel your soul—a field that exists that exists solely for the purpose of contemplation: art.
What art is
Think of the difference between Michelangelo’s David and the hunched-over figure of Rodin’s The Thinker. Think of the difference between the twisted, deformed Pietas of the Middle Ages and the proud, upright figure of Mary in Bouguereau’s Pieta. Think of the difference between the stirring, triumphant melody at the climax of the 3rd movement in Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony and the ominous, crashing notes that kick off Beethoven’s 5th.
You could say that these works stir very different emotions, and you would not be wrong. But it would be more accurate to say that each conveys a different kind of world. An artist builds a unique world, a universe that conveys: “This is life as I see it.” An artist recreates reality, but in a very different way than a photograph recreates reality. A photograph copies reality—an artist stylizes reality. She selects every detail—of a story, a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a song—and says to us: This is what’s important in life. This is what counts. This is what’s possible to human beings and worthy of contemplation.
Our daily lives are swamped by the journalistic, the accidental, the incidental. An artist cuts through the trivial and says: here’s what life is really about. That is what makes art, art. Because every element is selected, every element carries a meaning—and the meaning is, “This is what man is, this is what the world is, this is what life is.”
And this explains the profound emotional reactions we have to art. We fall in love with art when the artist’s view of life matches our own. “Yes, that is life as I see it.” We recoil in horror in disgust when we encounter a work and think, “No! That’s not how I see life.” All of this happens automatically and subconsciously. It’s not primarily an intellectual judgment, but an emotional reaction. It flows instantaneously from our core beliefs. It can take an enormous amount of work to understand and articulate what an artist is saying, and why it resonates or clashes with our own view of ourselves, the world, and man.
As with any act of contemplation, contemplating art fulfills a mental and emotional need. Mentally, Rand explains, art provides “a confirmation of [a man’s] view of existence—a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.” Emotionally, “the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.”
Start with the mental need art satisfies. If I told you that you should practice the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, you would have only a vague sense of what that means. You would struggle to understand how a person would apply those abstractions to the concretes of his life. But what if I told you the story of Christ and you asked yourself, “What would Jesus do?” Suddenly, your mind would grasp with enormous clarity the relevant virtues and how to apply them.
Similarly for the moral code I have outlined in this book. I have strived to explain what a morality of happiness requires—the values you should pursue and the virtues you should practice. I have strived to give examples to make these concepts vivid and clear. But the truth of the matter is, you can’t really understand the guidance this book offers unless you have read Ayn Rand’s novels. As Rand herself notes:
Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal. . . . This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.
Rand’s point and mine is not that art exists as a didactic moral guide. No. Art’s primary function is not to teach, but to show. It is for the sake of contemplation, not education. And not all art deals with moral issues. What all art does gives us is a view of life—a concretized philosophy.
This is what Jordan Peterson is hinting at when he discusses the importance of myth. Stories, he says, are inchoate philosophy. They provide us with a guide, long before we can articulate explicit philosophic principles. But Peterson’s view differs from the one I’m outlining in two important respects. Peterson seems to think that the very age of stories—that they have survived—validates them as guides to action, and that we are doomed if we have the hubris to rationally question them. My view is that art doesn’t validate—it concretizes. And it complements philosophy—it doesn’t replace it.
Art and philosophy go together. Each needs the other. As Leonard Peikoff explains:
An art work does not formulate the metaphysics it represents; it does not (or at least need not) articulate definitions and principles. So art by itself is not enough in this context. But the point is that philosophy is not enough, either. Philosophy by itself cannot satisfy man’s need of philosophy. Man requires the union of the two: philosophy and art, the broad identifications and their concrete embodiment. Then, in regard to his fundamental, guiding orientation, he combines the power of mind and body, i.e., he combines the range of abstract thought with the irresistible immediacy of sense perception.
What, then, of the emotional need fulfilled by art? The answer should now be clear. We experience our life as a process—a process of shaping the world and our own soul into our image of the ideal. Art gives us an image of this ideal. It allows us to live inside a world where our values have been achieved, where the best possible is realized, where we can look out and see what we’re trying to build fully finished.
The critics of happiness are wrong. We aren’t stuck on a treadmill where each achievement is meaningless because it unleashes our desire for still greater achievement. We can fill our lives with moments where our work is complete and we experience, in the act of contemplation, the fact that life is an end in itself.
How to love art
Art, at least some of it, can be enjoyed without effort. You turn on your favorite record or read your favorite novel or watch your favorite TV show and you’re instantly swept away. What took me a long time to discover, what some people never discover, is that you can get more out of art—if you put in the work.
Art can be more than candy to your eyes and ears. It can have a profound impact on your life and soul by exposing you to new worlds and new emotions. You can experience the heights of joy, beauty, and reverence—and the depths of grief, rage, and despair. You can examine the most profound questions of human existence and become transfixed and transformed. But you need to know how.
I first discovered this point in 2008 when I went on an art tour in Boston with a guide named Luc Travers. At that point, I had never had a significant emotional reaction to a painting. And not for lack of trying. I had visited the best museums in France, Germany, and Washington, DC. But all I had felt when looking at works by Da Vinci, Vermeer, Dali, and Van Gogh was a faint sense of: “That looks nice.” I would read the plaque, stand there for ten seconds, get bored, and move on.
I thought going with a tour guide might be different. Luc could tell me about the history of the painting and share some stories about the artist. That would be interesting. I love history. I love biography. But that’s not what Luc did. Not at all. The first thing he told us? Don’t look at the plaque. We weren’t there for a history lesson. We were there to learn how to see.
We arrived at the museum and despite the fact that it was filled with hundreds or perhaps thousands of paintings, Luc told us we were only going to look at four. “This is going to be a short tour,” I thought.
We stopped in front of a painting. Nothing special. Just a man seated next to a woman. “What do you see?” Luc asked. Someone started to brainstorm what the painting meant, but Luc interrupted. “No. I’m not asking you what you think this painting means. I’m asking you just to tell me what you see. Just start naming things.”
“The woman has her face pressed against the man’s.”
“They’re both looking down at something he’s writing or drawing.”
“They’re holding hands.”
It went on like that for a long time, with no detail too trivial. Sometimes, when an observation was inferential rather than self-evident, Luc would push us to justify our observation. “His face is serious. Hers is peaceful,” someone said. “Peaceful?” Luc replied. “Wouldn’t it be more peaceful if her mouth was closed?” “No, you’re right. Not peaceful. Reverential.”
He went on to ask other questions, like:
“What words would you use to describe the mood of this place?”
“Did he go over to her to show her something, or did she come over to him to see him working?”
“Does he want her to be there? Or does he feel like she’s disturbing him? Can you find three clues in the body language that suggests he does?”
“Where is his primary focus? Where is her primary focus?”
“What is she thinking at this moment?”
“Can you find five, subtle details that show how much they intimately care for each other?”
“When have you had a moment like this?”
“Can you think of any moments from movies, literature, that are similar?”
“What background music can you imagine fitting the mood?”
As the discussion went on, the painting became richer and richer with meaning. I could see more and more of it, and more and more in it. I felt emotions stirring, the same way I would watching a romantic scene in a powerful movie.
Finally, Luc gave his reading of the painting, which I’m going to quote at length because I don’t know of any other way to capture the power of that moment:
A young couple sits together in a golden light. They are intimately close, heads touching, holding hands, and her shoulders drawn into his. But they aren’t looking at each other. Their eyes are looking down at the large board he has on his knees where he seems to be writing or drawing. Did he come over to show her something? Or did she go over to him to see what he was working on?
I imagine he might have been sitting in this corner by the open window, taking advantage of the sunlight to illuminate the sketches he is working on. Then his beloved walked into the room and over to him, curious about what he was doing and wanting to be close to him. He doesn’t put his board down, nor does he tell her not to disturb him. Rather, he draws his legs back so that she can pull up close to him.
He tilts the board towards her, and he takes her hand, inviting her to observe what he is doing. She leans over, barely aware of the touch of his cheek on her brow, or even of his hand as her fingers loosen in his. Her attention is drawn towards what her lover is doing. The intimacy between the two is there, but it’s not at the forefront of their awareness. What is she thinking in this moment? It’s not so much, “You are wonderful!” but, rather, “I see how you are doing that.”
What is he working on that is keeping both of their attention? He might be showing her something that she’d be keenly interested in, like plans for their future home. Or he might be working on a project all his own that she might admire. In either case, he isn’t presenting to her a finished gift. He is sharing something perhaps more intimate—he is having her observe his process of creation. This is not a pristinely manicured poem he displays for her, rather; rather, he invites her to see his thoughts come as he paints. . . .
It’s hard to imagine a more romantic scene than in this painting: the early-evening sun shining, a secluded home, a cozy corner, the smell of ripe citrus in the air, and a couple who make me think of what Romeo and Juliet might have been in their late 20s. To add to this mood, I like to imagine a Chopin ballade playing in the background. Yet, in this scene imbued with romance, the intimacy between the two is understated—a subterranean river flowing beneath their shared moment. The title of this artwork is The Painter’s Honeymoon.
What I felt was rapture, and I remember the group walking away from the museum in awed silence.
Luc wasn’t there to spoon-feed us: he was teaching us how to have an esthetic experience.
One of the people with me on that tour was my friend Lisa VanDamme. If Luc Travers taught me to see, Lisa taught me to read.
Of course, I knew how to read in the sense of grasping the meaning of words on a page—just as I had been able to look at the paint on a canvas. But what Lisa showed me was: there is so much more hidden in the pages of a story than I could get merely by looking at the words on the page.
An artist, Lisa said, is saying something. He or she has selected every detail in accordance with this message. To get the most out of literature, you have to become a detective, putting together the clues until you understand the artist’s aim and vision. To be a reader is to be an active-minded integrator.
To be active-minded is to seek to understand: Why did the characters act the way they did? What made them tick? What did the story mean? What was the author trying to say? How did every detail support the message? What about that weird scene at the beginning that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the plot? Why was that there?
Here is an example from one of my favorite novels, Les Misérables. The story starts with a long section about the Bishop of Digne. Victor Hugo spends 60 pages telling us everything about the Bishop we could possibly want to know before introducing the book’s main character, Jean Valjean. After a brief encounter with Valjean that kicks off the book, we never hear from the Bishop again. The question is: Why? Why would Hugo write what amounted to a novelette about a seemingly minor character? It’s a question I had not asked on my first reading of Les Misérables. Lisa taught me to ask it.
Les Misérables tells the story of a man’s redemption. Jean Valjean begins as a criminal and spends the rest of his life on a quest to become a good man. And so Hugo must, at the start of the book, give us an image of what a good man is—of the ideal Jean Valjean will strive to become. (The first book of the novel is called “The Just Man.”) Grasping the purpose of the Bishop not only makes the novel more coherent, it makes the novel more enjoyable.
Great art isn’t inscrutable. On the contrary, what makes it powerful is that it can be understood—and this understanding deepens and enriches our experience. The more we understand intellectually, the more powerfully we react emotionally. And, what’s more: we learn how to take this same method of carefully observing events and extracting meaning from them, and apply it to our own lives. As Lisa explains in her riveting lecture, “Literature and the Quest for Meaning”:
Without great literature, we run the risk of living our lives like an indifferent crowd, of looking at things only with the naked eye, of failing to see beyond the surface of our experiences to their spiritual significance. But Hugo, and great artists like him, help us to develop a more penetrating perception.
Great literature is a spiritual microscope, that allows us to examine life minutely and marvel at that which had previously gone unobserved; or a telescope that lets us take in grand, new, and distant vistas in a single glance; or a stethoscope that gives us access to the very heart of life and allows us to know its pulses. All of these metaphors work, because art gives us the power to go beyond the barriers of our ordinary perception, and to see more. . . . [T]o see more means to see within our everyday experiences a connection to high ideals.
That is the power of literature and of art more broadly. Learn how to love it. And if you don’t already know how, seek out powerful guides. I am grateful to Luc and Lisa for teaching me how to love art—and I continue to return to them, to help me see more deeply into the universe of visual art, literature, and poetry, and so more deeply into my own life.
Find your guides. Learn to see, to read, to listen. Then enter your ideal world.