How to Live Forever
Creating great art in the modern era
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
- David Foster Wallace
All great art - be it writing, painting, music, whatever - requires isolation to create.
Physical isolation in a Unabomberesque Writer-In-The-Cabin-In-The-Woods sense can definitely be a part of it, but that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here.
I’m thinking of something much more profound.
When I read Slaughterhouse-Five I don’t just feel like I’m reading a great novel on a mere technical level. I’m not thinking “this book has a well-constructed plot [check], effective dialogue [check] and a great blend of tension and release [check check]; FIVE STARS FUCK YEAH”.
Greatness doesn’t automatically emerge when you check off enough boxes on a literal/metaphorical checklist.
The reason I know Slaughterhouse-Five is great is because, while reading it, I get the strong sense that I know exactly who Kurt Vonnegut is as a person. His worldview, his emotions, everything. It all comes through.
He may have died physically in 2007 but he lives on through his words. People who haven’t even been born yet and people whose parents haven’t even been born yet will one day read the same book and get the exact same sense that they know Kurt Vonnegut on a deep human-to-human level. Not just “wow some dead guy wrote a cool story” but “god damn, I actually know this guy".
A great book can make a dead writer feel more alive and real to you than the ambulatory corpses with functioning pulses and heartbeats that you live with on a day-to-day basis.
So how can you say the author is dead?
In all the ways that truly matter - his impact on the world, his philosophy, his very essence - he’s still with us.
Aliveness can’t be measured through the rote checking of vital signs (there’s that dreaded checklist again). Pulse, breathing, who cares. Does this person project who they are, not just in the present moment but in all moments (across time/space)? That’s what truly makes someone alive in the most meaningful sense of the word.
There’s a lot of debate about what a soul is and whether it even exists to begin with.
From the quote-unquote rational POV (a worldview that’s completely consumed our current era to the point where most can’t even conceive of a different way of thinking), if a soul exists at all it’s completely contained within the physical structure of the human body. It’s nothing more than brain chemistry and the random firing of neurons. It can all be explained by The Science™.
But when you say “I” (Latin: ego) are you talking about your physical body?
No.
I don’t care how consumed by the zeitgeist you are, you definitely don’t think of yourself as a random collection of organs/muscle/fat/bones wrapped in skin.
You have a strong sense that although ‘I’ might be currently inside your physical body, it isn’t defined or limited by it.
Great works of art are the proof.
A painter may have died hundreds of years ago, but it sure doesn’t feel that way when you stand in front of his creations.
You pay an admission fee to the museum of your choice, walk through the different exhibits, think “oh wow that one’s kinda cool” a bunch of times and keep moving. Then, inexplicably, something grabs you. You can’t look away. You stand and contemplate, just like someone stood and contemplated a hundred years ago and just like someone will stand and contemplate a hundred (five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand) years from now.
You contemplate, leave, go back to your life, and eventually die. Just like all the people who admired the same work of art in the past. Just like all the people who will come to admire it in the future. Every new group of humans admires, contemplates, and dies. Only the artist lives on.
Great artists do what all the anti-aging health-optimizing “I’m 55 chronologically but 37 biologically” tech gurus/influencers wish they could do but can’t: defy death.
So how do you create a great work of art?
By being completely yourself.
You can’t create anything profound or meaningful if you’re thinking of what the critics (official or otherwise) are going to say.
Some people claim you should write as if you’re writing to one specific person. I disagree. You should write as if no one in the world is going to read it at all.
Project yourself into the world with your words. Whether anyone sees them or not is irrelevant.
They say that you’re the average of the people you surround yourself with.
That may have been true pre-internet, but now a better way to think of it is: you are what you consume.
The internet is a despair engine that brings out the worst in people and crushes anything profound and meaningful under the monumental weight of utter averageness.
If you consume content from everyone then you become the average of everyone aka the dreaded and much-maligned Lowest Common Denominator.
The only way to find your unique voice is by limiting what you pay attention to.
Be like the old generation and tune out to tune in. But definitely don’t drop out. The world needs more people creating meaningful art and less people creating LCD slop.
Nietzsche says: “Become who you are”.
Easier said than done. But definitely worth striving for.