The Greatest Art
By Miles Connolly
Art by Linda Cook Devona
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look . . . To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of arts.
—Henry David Thoreau
In these words, Thoreau is trying to remind us that great art is not restricted exclusively to such pursuits as painting, music, sculpture and writing. There is an art of living, too.
One can find an artist’s work inspiring, while at the same time his life is common, petty, even sordid.
In contrast, Thoreau makes us think of such people as St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Florence Nightingale—not artists in the usual sense but persons who, through the nobility of their lives, affected the “quality of the day.” There is no limit to the number of such artists. It includes the countless obscure, good people who quietly affect the lives of those about them without even being aware they are doing it, winning no commendation, expecting none.
Everybody must at one time or another have known such persons, strangers as well as relatives or friends, who have changed the quality of the day for him. They come into a room in a dark hour—a sickroom, say, or a death room, a room without hope, or merely in an hour when we are lonely or discouraged. They may say little, if anything. But the shining quality of goodness radiates from them, from their mere presence, and where there was dark there is light, or the beginning of light; where there was cowardice there is courage; where there was listlessness there is love of life.
These friends and relatives—or wonderful strangers met at a picnic, in a lifeboat, a hospital waiting room—all these, humble and unaware, carry with them the kindness and generosity of their lives. These, it seems to me, are the greatest artists. For they practice the highest of the arts—the art of life itself.
Do you have a favorite encouraging and inspirational passage you’d like to share? Send it to me, and I’ll see if I can include it in a future edition of “The GreenPrints E-Letter!”
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