Blog post prompt for 9/15 - Emily Salamanca

"The artist speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives, to our sense of pity and beauty, and pain.” –Joseph Conrad

Art both reflects reality and puts the world in our own perspective. In this statement, Conrad believes similar to me because he says that art lets us express our feelings, while legitimizing our feelings as well. Art shows how filled we are with  sentiment and allows us to show off our magnitude of emotion. Similarly, in D.H. Lawrence's "Piano," he describes how his nostalgia weakens him. Lawrence states, "Down the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child / for the past." His primary emotion, nostalgia, leads to a secondary emotion, sadness. The poem immortalizes his feelings through words, so that the reader can too feel his pain. The poem presents the past as idealistic and beautiful, "...the glamour / Of childish days is upon me..." (ll. 10-11). He conveys his emotion to the reader, who then takes of the child's persona. Another example of this transfer of emotions through art is in "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. In the story, the narrator conveys his sense of wonder and awe at the cathedrals on TV to the blind man, who can not experience those feelings from sight. Instead, the blind man become awe-struck when the narrator begins drawing the cathedral with the blind man's hand on his own hand. The narrator experiences a 'eureka' moment when the blind man understand the power and beauty of the cathedral. In both cases, in "Cathedral" and "Piano," the artist's emotions are transferred to another person through art. Conrad generalizes the artist to speak for an entire community and I believe that art can express the feelings of a single person and then place those emotions in the heart of another.