I Always Loved You

And even if something had once been committed to paper, did it mean that it was still true? Always true? Unlike the relative permanence of paint, words were temporal. You uttered them and they evanesced, but if you wrote them, they remained, though whether the written word was any more truthful than the spoken was a mystery to her. Only paint was honest.

Form was a matter of precise measurement. Without the underpinning of accurate scaffolding, no piece of artwork succeeded. But for all of that, art was instinct, too. One felt the balance or imbalance. The revelation was something akin to a religious experience: You didn’t know the truth and then you suddenly knew it, and because of it everything was transformed.

If you are going to abandon your work because someone speaks ill of it, then it has never been your work, has it? It becomes theirs. You give it up.

Stop it, Mame. That’s enough self-pity,” Robert said. He stood, resting his hands on the edge of the dining table. “What is the matter with you? If you are going to abandon your work because someone speaks ill of it, then it has never really been your work, has it? It becomes theirs. You give it up. Do you want to do that? Your work is different; you declare it so; you want it to be so. But you cannot expect the world to understand when you ask them to look at work that is different than what they are used to seeing. The human mind is not equipped to adapt so rapidly. People have been told for so long what is good by the École des Beaux Arts that when something new comes along, they cannot adjust their thinking. Your work doesn’t look anything like what they have been told is good. Ergo, your pictures must be bad. It’s confused logic, but logic nonetheless. And it will alter with time. You must give it time. Why yield your confidence to a bunch of jackals?

Life, he now knew, was a fleet sprint from birth to death, revealed at twilight to be astonishingly brief.