Do you know what makes us human? Art.
If you think about it, art is essentially the creation of subjectively beautiful things that add no real concrete value to our material lives.
They in no way, shape or form help us physically survive, and realistically, no type of painting, sculpture or musical composition can save us from our inevitable end.
Yet we give art an astonishing importance. It makes us human because it feeds our soul rather than our body. And it does save lives.
Art can come in millions of different shapes and forms, and it’s not necessarily something you can physically touch.
But these little ounces of beauty, of magic, are what make you and I human, they are the bridge between us. I dare you to find one person on this whole rock flying through complete nothingness, that hasn’t at least once stopped and felt something while looking at a sunset.
Despite having a somewhat controversial philosophy on life, Friedrich Nietzsche once said that the essence of all art, all great art, is gratitude.
Pausing our frantic lives to simply notice beauty, is gratitude.
Nietzsche also said that we have art so as not to perish of the truth.
No one’s life is an immaculate pretty picture, each existence is inevitably tinted with black and grieved by shadows.
That is the truth.
Art sets us free.