Nora Yoon ’27 is a chemistry major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them. They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
As a child of an immigrant (and to that point, two financially cautious individuals not coming from wealth), I’ve always shared my father’s reservation toward art and the supposed necessity of it, despite being drawn toward poetry and literature since my seminal experiences with them in high school. Especially during college, as I began to seriously make plans for my own future, I was forced to confront this confusing, sinking question — whether or not the impulse I had to create art and my aspirations to be an artist were really worth pursuing. For most of my life this had been a given. Ever since middle school, falling in love with teammates, coworkers, close friends and sometimes the same person over and over again, I was able to maintain the conviction that the sonnets and prose I wrote inspired by my itinerant crushes mattered on an existential level. As long as there was someone to long for at night, I knew intuitively that life mattered, and so did my art.
Eventually, I got tired of being in love. I was forced to confront how the certainty I projected onto the objects of my affection was degrading and untrue: the ugliest truth that threatened to undo the meaning I had built my life around. But as Jean Rhys once wrote, “you imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn’t. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic: it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.” After the painful removal of this existential certainty that simply adoring someone was enough of a reason to live, the impulse to create, the belief that my experience mattered — after being in question for a long, empty, painful while — remained. Different, not as passionately convinced, but undeniably there.
And the opposite impulse — that art, that looking inward and attempting to transcribe some of the soul’s contents, is a frivolous activity for the privileged — remains also, but equally tempered by the truth. The refusal of the vital task to know ourselves, to deeply feel our own lives, will result in the most excruciating regret one can experience. In a book written by another artist, Sheila Heti, the narrator describes the main character Mira after leaving her father to pursue her dreams of literary fame thus: “she had gone into the world thinking she could achieve it, but all she had achieved was this strange distance from the person she loved.” Afraid of confronting her father’s love for her and his loneliness without her, Mira sees the vanity and hollowness of the aspirations that kept her from him. And then quickly, as she spends his last days with him, he dies, and Mira is left with the futile understanding that her father was not who she imagined he was, and that she feared the depth of her love for him, her loneliness without him. And she is left alone in the world with the books she could only regret loving more than her father, and the pain of not loving her father while he was still alive.
Having my own deep, complicated and loving connection to my family and literature alike, I have always been torn between acting as I should and being what I am. I think many artists house this fundamental contradiction and struggle with it throughout their lives. And meaning is neither something to take up our time while we exist, nor a cheap, futile project — it is an eventuality. Artists have that intuition, and attempt to cut through the illusions of our life to show us the inclinations of our heart lest we realize too late that despite all its pain, we do love the world and others, because we are so often ungracious or unkind with that love, like little children embarrassed by our feelings. One moves through life regardless of the consideration of difficult existential questions: art helps us to grapple with these things, offers us proof that people have been through versions of our hardship before.
And as an artist, when you are in the midst of creating, waiting for the next word, line or image to emerge, you know that you have something in common with the writers of mythology, with the creators of works of classic literature, or the directors of movies or the writers of songs or compositions, etc. You touch something divine and human that undoes any absolute certainties of meaninglessness, of hatred for the world, and you remember that the events of your life, the intense love, despair, dread and incredulous hope of life, matter deeply to you despite any attempt to escape this fact.
It’s a shock. In a mind grasping for control, art lifts the curtain and shows us our naked humanity. Its creation is as inevitable as love, and the question of — should I be an artist? Is it worth it? — has an answer that I’ve always known.
