A Yearning For The Hearth

I bought the new Bruce Springsteen album, ‘Magic’ on iTunes. I read the Rolling Stone review, they gave it five stars and said that it’s a better album than ‘The Rising,’ so my expectations were high. Well, I think it delivers. Is it better than ‘The Rising?’ It’ll take me some time to digest it enough to decide. However, I can say already that it’s very good.

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn

The Urn’s message to our generation, as well as to Keats’ is that: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Profound metaphysics? Utter banality? Something in between, I think. Beauty is not what we now imagine it to be – completely subjective, meaningless. It is real, and art without it is not art. Keats and his peers saw art, science, theology and the other rational pursuits of man as unlocking the truth of the universe and the nature of the divine in doing so. The more beautiful the art - the better the art – the closer it was to the divine, closer to truth.

 
Keats goes too far (I suspect even he knew that), but beauty is not unrelated to truth. And when we can’t tell good art from bad, or if we disregard the notion art being good or bad, something is wrong - something is missing.