Art …is the means to recapture something entirely invisible, wholly interior, and possibly inconspicuous: a healthier and more integrated state at the center of one’s own being. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life.
Prelude to a dawn
As I sit on the couch shortly after 4 A.M., the final chords have just resounded from the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. Having woken up with roiling thoughts and a sense of unease, Anna Fedorova’s luminous piano playing from the opening delicate strains, followed by her emotive gestures to the sensitive orchestral accompaniment has unearthed “an unsuspected, multicolored treasure”, filling me with serenity and calmness, the music painting a musical fresco of “a lily-like dawn in the country”. The rousing, exuberant brio of the final movement with Fedorova’s fingers flying over the keys has put an exclamation point on my mood change. The transformative power of music has made me forget the fractious world. In his recent book on mysticism, the philosopher Simon Critchley discusses how listening to music can be a secular form of devotional practice, opening up “a space where we can push back against the pressure of reality”.
My morning devotional practice continues with what Maurice Blanchot referred to as “the light, innocent YES of reading”. Yesterday morning I read in Julian Barnes’ valedictory novel that great art is always consolatory. I have come to believe that more than that, it also offers a sense of spiritual fulfillment.
To send light into the darkness
The Noble Prize Committee in Literature, in awarding the prize to László Krasnahorkai, described his work by saying that it “in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art”. Wassily Kandinsky in his book, The Spiritual in Art said that music, literature, and art form the mightiest elements of spiritual life. He quotes the composer Robert Schumann saying “to send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.” Art offers a secular way of searching for meaning by giving access to a deeper reality. It valorizes human achievement, mastery, and creativity, offering solace to the beleaguered soul at a time when the events unfolding leave us feeling spiritually unmoored. It is great art that endures.
Realm of the sublime and the sacred
Krasznahorkai, in his recent novel, Herscht 07769, invokes this transcendent realm of art. The main character, Herscht, has a spiritual awakening upon being introduced to the music of Bach, sensing this realm, where the experiential world “becomes but a mere idea”. Through Bach’s genius, “we know this realm exists and there is a path leading to it…. difficult to describe using the grammar and vocabulary known to us”.
Krasznahorkai’s vision of the arts, allowing for intimations of the sublime and sacred, is most in evidence in Seiobo There Below. In one story, a man who guards the Venus de Milo daily in the Louvre is content although living a solitary existence, the sculpture being his greatest enchantment, originating “from a heavenly realm that no longer existed”. In “Distant Mandate” the immortal perfection of the Alhambra is beyond comprehension with its “nearly inhuman enchantment with which everything dazzles there within”.
Threshold of the spiritual
Marcel Proust, in Days of Reading, said that “reading is on the threshold of spiritual life”. While not constituting spiritual life, reading introduces us to it. It is a “fertile communication effected in solitude”. This threshold is present in Proust’s masterpiece, especially in his discussion of the power of the arts in the Guermantes library before the famous bal-des-têtes scene. Julia Kristeva, in her erudite, illuminating book, Time and Sense, the best book I have read about his work, hints at the spiritual nature of reading Proust, describing his work as “an immense evangelical structure, the Divine Comedy of life…. ours”; it offers the reader a source of “sacredness and communion.”
Moments of abrupt crystallization
Looking at art and marveling at its beauty can have a spiritual component. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl felt a moment of “abrupt crystallization” while viewing Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, when a patch of lapis-lazuli-tinted white on her headscarf created “an illusion of reality more thrilling than any lived reality could be”. Robert Walser, writing about van Gogh’s portrait of his landlady Madame Ginoux, spoke of a sense of nobility, “a solemnity of the soul that it is impossible to overlook”. I have experienced this solemnity and nobility when looking at Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, a print of which was on my office wall for years, with its moving evocation of the passage of time. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s beautifully melancholic depiction of quietude and introspection, Interior. Young Woman Seen from Behind, compelled me to write about it.
Limitless possibilities of expression
Reading cellist Anastasia Kobekina’s thoughtful, eloquent liner notes to her recent recording of the Bach Cello Suites resonated deeply with me. She entitled them Infinite Lines evoking the idea of the music floating in a vast inner landscape. Kobekina speaks of the cello suites engendering an inner dialogue, which is what the best art does, leading us on a journey inward. Her discussion is replete with phrases encapsulating what I look for in an artistic work. She describes the music as exhibiting “limitless possibilities of expression, movement, shape, and color”. She also says the suites induce “polyphonic worlds from a single line”, the word polyphony echoing Kristeva’s description of Proust’s use of language.
The unknown, incalculable colorings of an unsuspected world
Listening to her interpretation of Bach, I decided to reread passages of Proust’s narrator describing the septet by Vinteuil, the musical genius of his masterwork; surely Proust would express my feelings regarding Kobekina’s playing better than I could ever hope to. Yes, indeed. Her phrasings are “caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and soft as scarves”, and through her passion and magisterial playing she brings forth “the unknown, incalculable colorings of an unsuspected world”. I marvel at the beautiful, sonorous sound of her centuries-old Stradivarius cello, itself a wondrous work of art. She is conversant with those who have gone before her while having the imagination and creativity to imprint the haecceity of her own style on these pieces. The music is a Heraclitian tonal river of light and shade, exuberance and melancholy. She possesses these suites and, in turn, so does the listener.
Truth and introspection
As part of my “devotional” reading practice, I often find myself returning to the Australian author Gerald Murnane, who has been described as a grounded visionary writing mystic fictions. I agree with his assessment of the essence of reading as images and feelings floating in an inner landscape. I take heart from him telling me to “accept as truths only the findings of (my) own introspection”. As a writer, I marvel at the oftentimes complex yet perfectly grammatical sentences with their multiple clauses, where “a simple seeming image might portend a dense network of meaning”. Regarding the spiritual aspect that reading can take, one need only recall Borges’ famous claim that he had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
The still point of the turning world
The news today from around the world makes us despair of its darkness, as reason seems on the verge of being vanquished and beauty is increasingly difficult to find. Whether I am reading, or looking at art, or listening to music, I have moments of entering a state of solace and serenity, where time ceases to exist, allowing access to a deeper reality and a spirituality, which is in no sense religious, my being a non-believer, rather better described as a kind of enchantment or dazzlement. I continue to hope for these moments of experiencing “the still point of the turning world”.
References
The phrases “unfolding an unsuspected….” and “lily-like dawn” are by Marcel Proust (see reference below).
Maurice Blanchot, “Reading” in The Gaze of Orpheus (and Other Literary Essays), Station Hill Press, 1981.
Simon Critchley, Mysticism, New York Review of Books, 2024
Anna Fedorova, Liberté (CD), Channel Classics, 2026
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Dover, 1977
Anastasia Kobekina, Bach ( 6 Cello Suites for Violoncello Solo) (2 CDs), Sony Classical, 2025
Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense (Proust and the Experience of Literature), Columbia University Press, 2025
Làszlò Krasznahorkai – Herscht 07769, New Directions, 2025,
————————— Seiobo There Below, New Directions, 2013
Gerald Murnane, Stream System, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018
———————, Last Letter to a Reader, And Other Stories, 2022
Marcel Proust, Days of Reading, Penguin, 2008
—————— The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, Penguin Classics, 2002.
Peter Schjeldahl, “Vermeer” in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (100 Art Writings, 1988-2018), Abrams Press, 2019
Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures, New Directions Books, 2015.
Still point of the turning world is from “Burnt Norton” in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets , Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1971
Kimmo Rosenthal, after a long career of teaching and publishing mathematics, has turned his attention to writing. He has over forty literary publications and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Some of his recent work has appeared in Hinterland, The Fib Review, BigCityLit, The RavensPerch, Sage Cigarettes, and After the Art.
