My Artistic Statement

What does it mean to live a literary life? To get started, I need to define some key terms presented in this argument. By literary, I am referring to the writing, the words and the ideas presented in types of written work. I also need to define what I consider life to be; life is what distinguishes living things from nonliving things. Life consists of fundamental aspects such as engaging with the world outside your body, being in existence, and existence from birth to death.

By living a literary life, you center your life around literature and intentionally apply your insights and knowledge from it in your daily life. While daily life looks different for everyone, it always involves being alive and making conscious decisions. When we think of the word daily, we can literally look at a twenty-four-hour span of a day or the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun. We can also view it as a way to summarize what we typically do during the day over a period of time.

Why does it matter how we live our lives? This may seem like a dumb question; however, it is something worth thinking about. How did we decide that our lives are valuable and that our choices mean something? Without concern for how we live our lives, we would not have a functioning society and would not be able to form meaningful relationships with others. Our lives would be meaningless without decisions holding any weight. Without considering our feelings and others’ feelings, we would not be a functional society. We would be wild animals whose sole purpose in this life is to survive and reproduce.

Our lives are important, our experience as humans on this earth is our density, whether we like it or not. That being the case, we should make the best out of our human experience.

Literature has been around since, one might say, the beginning of time. It is not only a way to communicate with others, but also to share ideas and make concepts known. Without the ability to write, whether through symbols or words, we would not be able to advance as a society, nor would we know anything about our roots and history.

If we know the history of our Earth and our ancestors, we can give new meaning to life. We have something we must continue, and something we cannot take for granted. Our ancestors worked hard to make the world what it is today; we have the same responsibility to make it an even better place for future generations.

When we read literature, we can see the world and concepts in a new way. A new way that we may or may not agree with. It may have no impact on us at all, or it might change our entire perspective on life. The point is, we do not know what impact it might have on us until we read it. What might be impactful to one might be utterly meaningless to another. It is crucial that we make our own decisions on what matters to us and what is worth our time reading, as we are the only ones who can determine the worth of the words presented.

Now, looking deeper into why one should live a literary life. When we consume media and literature, we are exposed to someone else’s brain’s inner workings that we most likely could not discover ourselves. Even pieces of creative literature can change the way we view the world. It can spark new ideas and concepts we would never have thought of before. The creativity we are exposed to, whether consciously or unconsciously, prompts us to think about the world around us and offers new perspectives and meanings in life. Literature makes us feel emotions we would not feel if we didn't experience them. While this sounds redundant, it is true and often overlooked.

The power of literature and the new ideas, concepts, and emotions that arise from it are what make us unique individuals with our own set of beliefs, which we can only acquire by accepting and rejecting the ideas presented to us.

These new ideas, emotions, and concepts change how we go about our daily lives, whether we realize it or not. What our brain reads, hears, sees, and retains from those senses is not always up to us. It will remember things it deems useful and important to us.

Incorporating ideas we gain from reading literature in our lives is the only way for us to better ourselves and challenge any problematic ideas we may have. When we are confined to our own bubble or community, we can miss out on a lot of diversity and potentially miss out on what could be life-changing. You don’t know until you experience it and read it. You have to approach each piece of literature with an open heart and an open mind, setting aside any prior beliefs and judgments so you can fully absorb the text in a way that you are unbiased and more likely to think about it. When we approach text and life in general with preexisting judgements and biases, we trap ourselves in a box, whereas we could be frolicking through a field of possibilities.

When we acquire new knowledge and ways of viewing the world through literature, we will see the world in a new way. We will have more compassionate, thoughtful, meaningful, and unbiased interpretations of the world around us. By living through a literary lens, we are destined to live our most authentic lives, as we gain a better understanding of ourselves and our values. When you engage with literary work in a way that is genuine and imaginative, it will transform your view of life in the same way. Life will be full of new possibilities and meanings that you could not form yourself. Knowledge comes from sharing ideas, and when you don’t engage in that process, you are not going to truly grow as a person, not just academically, but as a virtuous being.