Why we can’t live without art

Bread vs poetry.

French poet Charles Baudelaire who is my direct inspiration for this article wrote in 1846:

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days, but not without poetry.” (in Critique littéraire).

The first time I’ve read this sentence, I couldn’t get its meaning.

Basically, it could appear only as a provocation and a way to challenge the temptation of comfort and materialism which were arising when Baudelaire wrote this aphorism. It was obviously a way for him to warn young people against middle-class values. Nowadays, these words sound even more strange and remote from the realities of the world, where crowds of humans are starving for the most primary needs.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that Baudelaire is right. He was not speaking about survival or body care but about human mind and human soul which need to be fed too. More deeply indeed, this sentence brings about the very power of poetry — which is the very power of Beauty as well. Only a healthy man, as Baudelaire emphasizes, can really understand how important poetry, music, art are, for living. This is about health and sanity. Actually, in another part of his writings, Baudelaire said: « You can live without bread for three days; you can’t do without poetry, at all; and those of you who say the contrary are mistaken: they don’t know little about themselves » (in Critique d’art, « Salon de 1846 », Dédicace aux bourgeois, 1846).

Today, it seems we have forgotten what we, as human beings, really need. We may have food, we may have comfort — but do we really take care of ourselves as a whole, including our soul and our heart?

Art is food for the soul.

How could it be? Let’s have a look at what happens inside us when we are in contact with what is called beauty, whatever it is — music, painting, picture, a particular face or landscape… Something changes inside us, something stirs, something breaks loose. Suddenly, we are more than ourselves, more than our lives, we feel connected with a bigger presence outside us. This sense of union widens our feeling of « being », as if transcended. Such an experience — the « aesthetic » experience — alienates us from our own selfish concerns. Beauty flows upon us and brings us quietness, calm, joy, bliss, wonder.

Art feeds this part inside us that we so often forget as if it did not exist, leaving us with a feeling of emptiness. Art nurtures our soul and our heart. It opens a door within, awakens us to something greater and wider, and shows a way to reconnect with a state of wholeness. In that sense, art has a power of resurrection: as Christian Bobin writes (in La Présence pure),

« to see and hear are enough. It’s only inadvertently that we don’t get into heaven when alive, only inadvertently ».