The Life Dream

Fifteen or twenty years ago, The New York Times ran a piece by Margo Jefferson. I no longer remember the burden of it, but I remember that she said that she sometimes listened to country music. In talking to friends who knew more about it, who perhaps had grown up with it, she tried to distinguish between the good country music and the rest; but they rejected the distinction. On the other hand these friends made the same sort of distinction in the music that Ms. Jefferson preferred, and she rejected their distinction. (Ms. Jefferson is African-American: how she characterized her preferred music I don't remember.) At the time I thought that I agreed with her about country music and with the country fans about hers, and I quickly forgot about it.

I thought of that this week when I encountered in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Chapter "Image and Word", the paragraph

Contemporaries who see the works of art being born accept them without question into their life dream. They do not appreciate them on the basis of objective aesthetic perfection, but on the basis of the resounding reverberation within them of the sacredness or passionate vitality of their subject matter. Only when the old life dream is dreamed out with the passing of time, and sacredness and passion have vanished like the scent of a rose, only then, by virtue of its means of expression, that is, its style, structure, and its harmony, does the purely artistic effect of a work of art begin. These elements may actually be the same in both the fine arts and literature, but they may, nonetheless, generate an entirely different artistic evaluation.

In the United States, one need not wait for a life dream to be dreamed out. One can just get in the car and drive twenty miles to find another that displaces it.