Art is not for art's sake. Art, for Pete's sake, is a response to particulars of experience otherwise deflected, packaged, ignored, misunderstood. Inevitably runs up against inimical authorities, if there are any; inevitably outlives those conflicts; ineluctably represents crises of moral choice and vocation.

I'm getting this from Shattuck's book about Proust (who was, he says, often lumped, wrongly, with the purists).

If you're not an aesthete, does this mean you have to dumb down your rhetoric and vocabulary, write for someone other than yourself, become "accessible"? No; but by the same token, take care that your ornamentation, your felicities of style, are not merely designed to impress a coterie. They're not worth the trouble.

Reading Roger Shattuck's book about Proust (again). Kerouac's contradictions (alluded to in previous post) echoed in Proust's everlasting dialectic between art/idolatry and experience/suffering. That is, Kerouac's suspicion of "poetry" is similar to Proust's ambivalence about art & its aesthetes. Art is the lure, the drug of the inauthentic; the false fulfillment of envious ambition; etc.

Unless the art is true. He goes into his cork-lined room for 14 years.