CLEANING YOUR ROOM IS NOT ENOUGH

I have become known for encouraging people to clean up their rooms. Perhaps that is
because I am serious about that prosaic piece of advice, and because I know that it is
a
much more difficult task than it appears. I have been unsuccessfully cleaning up my
room, by the way—my home office (which I generally keep in relatively pristine
condition)—for about three years now. My life was thrown into such chaos over that
period by the multitude of changes I experienced—political controversies,
transformation of career, endless travel, mountains of mail, the sequence of illnesses
—
that I simply became overwhelmed. The disorganization was heightened by the fact
that
my wife and I had just finished having much of our house renovated, and everything
we
could not find a proper place for ended up in my office.
There is a meme floating around the internet, accusing me of hypocrisy on account of
this: a still taken from a video I shot in my office, with a fair bit of mess in the
background (and I cannot say that I look much better myself). Who am I to tell
people to
clean up their rooms before attempting to fix the rest of the world when, apparently, I
cannot do it myself? And there is something directly synchronistic and meaningful
about that objection, because I am not in proper order at that moment myself, and
my
condition undoubtedly found its reflection in the state of my office. More piled up
every
day, as I traveled, and everything collected around me. I plead exceptional
circumstances, and I put many other things in order during the time my office was
degenerating, but I still have a moral obligation to get back in there and put it right.
And
the problem is not just that I want to clean up the mess. I also want to make it
beautiful:
my room, my house, and then, perhaps, in whatever way I can manage, the
community.
God knows it is crying out for it.
Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to
make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have
established
a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out
into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine. That
is
the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty
of
the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that.
If you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can
familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization. This is a very good
idea
—a veritable necessity—because people have been working out how to live for a long
time. What they have produced is strange but also rich beyond comparison, so why
not
use it as a guide? Your vision will be grander and your plans more comprehensive.
You
will consider other people more intelligently and completely. You will take care of
yourself more effectively. You will understand the present more profoundly, rooted as
it
is in the past, and you will come to conclusions much more carefully. You will come to
treat the future, as well, as a more concrete reality (because you will have developed
some true sense of time) and be less likely to sacrifice it to impulsive pleasure. You
will
develop some depth, gravitas, and true thoughtfulness. You will speak more precisely,
and other people will become more likely to listen to and cooperate productively with
you, as you will with them. You will become more your own person, and less a dull
and
hapless tool of peer pressure, vogue, fad, and ideology.
Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a
genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is
a
window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite
and
limited and bounded by your ignorance. Unless you can make a connection to the
transcendent, you will not have the strength to prevail when the challenges of life
become daunting. You need to establish a link with what is beyond you, like a man
overboard in high seas requires a life preserver, and the invitation of beauty into your
life is one means by which that may be accomplished.
It is for such reasons that we need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking
about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affectation. Art is the bedrock of
culture
itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically,
and come to establish productive peace with others. As it is said, “Man shall not live
by
bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). That is exactly right. We live by beauty. We live by
literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and
beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic.
And
we must be sharp and awake and prepared so that we can survive properly, and orient
the world properly, and not destroy things, including ourselves—and beauty can help
us
appreciate the wonder of Being and motivate us to seek gratitude when we might
otherwise be prone to destructive resentment.