Maria Popova on Virginia Woolf – reality of art and the tremendous perceptive capacities of writers

“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow asserted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech” (Popova, 9/9/2015).

“There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.” Pablo Neruda illuminated this notion from another angle in his magnificent metaphor for why we make art…” (Popova, 9/9/2015).

In this great article from Maria Popova (9/9/2015), Maria artfully pulls back a few layers of the impenetrable, yet quite discernable (particularly in the absence thereof), perception and senses of artists – “the sensemaking mechanism we call art,” (Popova, 9/9/2015).

“Befittingly, Woolf would later transmute this insight into a beautiful line from Mrs. Dalloway: “The compensation of growing old [is] that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light” (Popova, 9/9/2015).