I don't think that's selfish. We've of course discussed this before, but maybe part of getting older is accepting the inevitability that we're not as unique as we thought when we were younger, and because of this we find that we have less and less to learn from the outside world.

I think about the idea of raising a child, and one thing that's on my mind about it is that there is nothing new you can teach that child - sure, it'll all be new for her or him, but all you can do is spend the first 20 years or so catching them up with what the rest of the world already knows. So from the child's perspective - which in this case is us - as we get older we realize this, and so tend to turn inwards as we age as the world is no longer as fresh and new as it once seemed.

For myself, at least concerning my reading habits, I've found that over the past year or so I take a lot more pleasure in fiction than I used to. I think it's a combination of two things - one, I think I find comfort in seeing a subjective experience of the world that I can relate to - even if it's fictional it's still been conceived and written by a real person. Secondly, I find that I can't concentrate on non-fiction, history, politics like I used to. While they're all interesting and important, at the age of 31 I'm already seeing the world around me repeat itself, and that gets frustrating. As part of getting older, maybe I'm also finding stories more engaging than events, and that the individual is more interesting than the collective. More important? I'll have to think about that one.

On the question of what is art. Beautifully put.


Knowledge can never transform the world,' I blurted out, skirting along the very edge of confession. 'What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else.'

[...]

'There you go!' he said. 'Action, you say. But don't you see that the beauty of this world, which means so much to you, craves sleep and that in order to sleep it must be protected by knowledge? You remember that story of 'Nansen Kills a Kitten' which I told you about once. The cat in that story was incomparably beautiful. The reason that the priests from the two halls of the temple quarreled about the cat was that they both wanted to protect the kitten, to look after it, to let it sleep snugly, within their own particular cloaks of knowledge. Now Father Nansen was a man of action, so he went and killed the kitten with his sickle and had done with it. But when Choshu came along later, he removed his shoes and put them on his head.

What Choshu wanted to say was this. He was fully aware that beauty is a thing which must sleep and which, in sleeping, must be protected by knowledge. But there is no individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence. I think that is what he wanted to say.

Now you want to play the role of Choshu, don't you? Well, beauty -- beauty that you love so much -- is an illusion of the 'other way to bear life' which you mentioned. One could say in fact there is no such thing as beauty. What makes the illusion so strong, what imparts it with such a power of reality, is precisely knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation. It may be a woman, it may be one's wife, but it is never a consolation. Yet from the marriage between this beautiful thing which is never a consolation, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, something is born. It is as evanescent as a bubble and utterly hopeless. Yet something is born. That something is what people call art.'

-- From Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

[and seen by me here]