I’ve been thinking about the Gertrude Stein’s idea that novels must not be too interesting. The ultimate function being to push us into idleness that allows us to set down the book and return us to the world.
All art has limitations…the primary one being that it is only ever an imitation of life.
Thoreau points to this in a journal entry about the limitations of art, preemptively agreeing with Stein that “the highest condition of art is artlessness.”
The best poetry has never been written, for when it might have been, the poet forgot it, and when it was too late remembered it; or when it might have been, the poet remembered it, and when it was too late forgot it. The highest condition of art is artlessness. Truth is always paradoxical. (June 26, 1840)
Henry David Thoreau