26th
Art and Lies in Three Passages from Sappho: I
Look up. A hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Unconcerned with me, that confidence of stars, light offerings, two thousand years old. If they are anything to me they are jewels for my shroud. I cannot know them. I cannot even know myself. Pascal’s terror is mine: ‘Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.’ What can balance the inequity of that huge space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Perhaps this: The beatland of my body is not my kingdom’s scope, I have within, spaces as vast, if I could claim them. Proof? What proof have I of this—Not God, who, if true, is a priori and cannot be a proof, but art, that never concerns itself with the actualities of life, neither depicts it as we think it is, nor expressses it as we hope it is, and yet becomes it. Not representations, but inventions that bear in themselves the central forces of the world, and not only the world. Art ranches the stars.
How can I come close to the meaning of my days? I will lasso them to me with the whirling word. The word carried quietly at my side, the word spun out, vigorous, precise, the word that traps time before time traps me.
—Jeanette Winterson
