Once again, I’m reading quite a long book, and so am forced to actually think in order to come up with blogging fodder. Consider that your warning.

A while back I did some semi-coherent posts about Art. I was trying to work out – more or less in real time – what beauty is and why it matters to Christians. I got into the similarities (only similarities – they’re not the same thing) between aesthetic experience and religious experience. It all had to do with C.S. Lewis’s Joy and mythopoeia.

But there’s a further point which is – it seems to me – the actual point, and I didn’t quite extract it then. But here it is now:

Art is the effort to eternalize a moment of beauty.

One of the most frustrating things about the pursuit of beauty is that it’s fleeting. Describing Joy, Lewis emphasized the fact that it’s temporary by nature. It comes and goes. Try to maintain it, and it slips through your fingers like a handful of water. Try to recreate it, and it’s shyer than a doe in the forest. (Try to mix your metaphors, and you produce something less than art.)

Nevertheless, the artist’s job is to attempt to recreate the moment of Joy.

He can’t dispense Joy from a container. He can’t cook it up in a pot.

But he can produce a work – it may be a sculpture or a painting or a play or a ballet, or some other example of an artistic medium – that provides an opportunity for Joy to creep in on its own. Sort of like putting seed out to attract a bird.

In Goethe’s play, “Faust,” the magician makes a bargain with Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles promises to serve him as long as he lives. But, as Faust says:

“When I say to the Moment flying; 
'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' 
Then bind me in thy bonds undying, 
And my final ruin I will bear!”

In other words, Faust will lose the bargain and be damned the moment he experiences something so wonderful that he longs for time to stop.

That’s the artist’s challenge – to generate beauty that “tempts” the audience to desire to prolong the moment.

That puts the artist in Mephistopheles’ place, which is awkward, but we just have to live with that. Artists will never be quite respectable.