Craving Art

Literature can be- and much else but literature in particular- if we lose our natural and proper place, horribly utilitarian. We are grasping towards some end; there is something missing is us, some aching void it is the task of the literature to fill; but the mind is infinitely subtle and if this mindset rules then the space into which truth can flow, truth into truth, is not there, covered by the very desire to fill the perceived emptiness. And actually this craving is both the means and the end of itself; this end being the continuation of the entity, the 'self,' the knot of consciousness, which craves, and this continuation of itself is achieved by craving. It must remain active or it is no more. It offers the illusion of having an end beyond itself, but in truth its purpose is its own existence, which is achieved by the state of craving.

Though perhaps, and perhaps there is no perhaps, given the nature of that grasping mind with its crude worlds of means and ends, its sham nature can quite easily convince itself of being satiated, of having been filled with the most wholesome of sham art. All it needs is to experience something 'external' as crude as itself, which again satisfies the certainty of its own existence, validates its own nature, asserts the truth of its being, and with much joy such art which fails to threaten the perpetuation of the knot of consciousness is triumphantly labeled great art.