“But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one’s table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.”
Rebecca West, Black Lamb Grey Falcon
Rebecca West’s Black Lamb Grey Falcon is an amazing book – part travel diary, part history, part political manifesto, part exploration of the human condition. West was a novelist, and essayist, and feminist, and the book is a record of her travels through Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the late 1930’s, describing the young country’s mosaic of cultures and its troubled history.
All of West’s works explore aesthetics, and she wrote a book of essays, The Strange Necessity, on the subject. What I like about the quote above is her notion that great works of art are fundamentally works of love, and that the everyday works of love, unrecognized as art, are nonetheless related.