Thread by @ploughmansfolly

There is scene in River Runs Through It where Brad Pitt character shows awesome prowess and commitment to catching huge fish, floating halfway down the river and almost over giant waterfall. His onlooking brother, the narrator, then says, “I knew then I was witnessing perfection https://t.co/Vpxualz07a

…but just as surely that life *is not a work of art* and the moment could not last.” I often juxtapose this scene, which I’ve always found moving and maybe truthful, with BAP mishimian exhortation: MAKE YOURSELF A WORK OF ART!

It makes me think favorite lines from Brothers K, which basically says that everything that is, living and inert, actually *is* a work of art—infinitely complex and perfectly ordered and inexhaustibly intelligible—everything except for man, whose default tends to mar the canvas

All rays and beams can be traced back to where they converge, and the truth is contained in a single infinitesimal point around which all the rest of existence revolves. Interdasting. As movie says, “all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

Man wants to project his wretchedness onto the rest of the world, when in truth no other creature shares our alienation from our creator’s intention. Their existences, as cogs in ecological machines and as cogs unto themselves, are works of art, of higher and lesser orders

Even drabness and the gore of nature can be understood this way, but it is great folly for man mistake this solemnity of nature for fallenness or distance btwn creature and creator, because it gives him an excuse not to excel, or at least to hitch his wagon to a man of excellence

Yes is true, life is not a work of art. But you could make yours one if you just stopped being so ghey and worrisome about everything. After all, when was the last time you saw a sparrow gathering wheat into a barn? Squirrel is exception that proves the rule. And this is Darwin..

Misinterpretation anyway. Squirrel does not know future. He does not exist in time. He is not storing acorn and other nuts for winter. He is planting oaks and hickories. He does this because it pleases Him.