From the time I was a kid, I always had this notion that the more I read, the more movies I watched, the more knowledge and experience I gained, the closer I would be to solving the mysteries of Life. 

Not knowing why we are here, what came before and Why, what would follow and Why – they were uncomfortable question marks. And I suppose a belief set in that there were the tools in front of us here on earth to potentially unravel those mysteries. Yes, Math and Science, but maybe Art figured in there as well.

Would life be any happier, if these things were known? There is a type of mystery plot in which the solution is, in the end more tragic than satisfying (The good news is you’ve learned who the serial killer is… the bad news – it’s your father!) But that could not detract me – the need to know persists.

The idea that literature, film, art, music could empower a person to see beyond themselves and gain the capacity to know the unknown was attractive to me. A religious experience. 

Then, in college, I encountered a biographical film about Jean-Paul Sarte. The film includes an intimate interview in which he recounts his childhood and what was, for him, a realization.

In those [early] days, reading represented the very core of reality. All else was peripheral…a sort of fantasy, since I was unhappy in the real world. My idealism stemmed from the conviction that reality could be learned from words. 

For 30 years I believed books offered an elusive form of truth- A secret metaphysical view of things. When I read Dostoevsky at 17, I felt he was revealing secrets to me.  It wasn’t ordinary “knowledge.” It was faintly mysterious.

In the end I realized Literature was like all human activity. It yielded no secrets. It was just a record of a period and its people. But it took me a long time. “

-Jean Paul Sartre

This view may be seen to some as obvious. But still in my life, it seems cynical to me. Can literature reveal “secret” and “mysterious” knowledge?  

Is art something that “like all human activity… yields no secrets?”

But there is another way of viewing things. Human activity, does in fact yield the answers to secrets. In science this is easy to measure. But art also has the power to be prophetic, instructive and healing. 

It is a worthy idea to explore.