Art as a Source of Resilience

How creativity helps push us along in trying times

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Resilience.

Most often, resilience is thought of as pushing on or having the mental fortitude to do what needs to be done to persevere. Yet, we hardly ever consider art as a tool that helps bring forth resilience in hard times.

While today we have become a consumption culture, the history of art shows that it was not meant to simply entertain but rather to understand the life we each inhabit.

Art for art’s sake was not a thing, rather, art as representative of the struggles of the day, the push and pull between beauty and pain, between good and evil, horror and awe, this is what art originally was.

“To speak to everyone about everyone, it is necessary to speak of what everyone knows and the reality that is common to us all,” wrote the philosopher Albert Camus.

Art, in its simplest form, helped to bring forth words to the experiences we all faced.

“Life is not only found where a person happens to be,” Camus wrote. “Life is also found in the other lives that gives shape to theirs.”

Behind every piece of art is an artist who imbues their own worldview, and in turn, their life’s story. But we never stop to think what that piece meant to them, why they needed to express themselves in such a way.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is written at a time when Shelley is struggling with multiple losses.

In 1815, Shelley, aged 17 or so, prematurely gives birth to her daughter who wouldn’t survive more than two weeks.

This experience and the grief that it held had to be hard for Shelley whose own mother, the famed writer and activist Mary Wollstonecraft died after giving birth to Shelley.

The notion of birth and death were powerful forces in Shelley’s life. A little over a year after losing her daughter, Shelley was hit with additional tragedies in quick succession. Her lover Percy Shelley’s estranged wife committed suicide. Shortly after, her own half-sister, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide from what is believed to be the feeling of rejection.

Within such a short span, Shelley was introduced to the brutal hardships of life’s fragility. One can imagine the power of someone in such grief manifesting a story wherein they discover a way to bring forth life in an almost magical way.

There is also a line within Frankenstein that stands out that could be viewed as Shelley’s attempt to make sense of the death of Fanny. At one point within the novel, the monster states, “I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.” We can imagine Shelley writing this in an attempt to make sense of the loss of Fanny and the impression it left on her.

“Free artists are those who, with great difficulty, create order themselves,” wrote Camus.

Art is a manifestation of the stories and experiences the artist has in their lives.

The artist finds ways to take their pain and experience and make sense of it, bringing forth ways to cope with the hard times. For many, art is a therapy that helps bring order to the chaos of the world, a world that at times can seem so incredibly indifferent to our very existence.

But it is through this ability to use creativity that we build strength. When we take our pain and use it as fuel in a creative outlet, we give ourselves a way to process such difficulties.

“The suffering of humankind is such an important subject that it seems no one could understand it,” Camus said.

And this very much may be true. But it is through art that we begin to process our struggles and in turn, find resilience in trying times.

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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