by: mumu

月初有朋友发给我“小木屋”——一个租借纸质书的小程序。从“漫游鲸”，“多抓鱼”到“小木屋”，看着别人在做自己想做的事情，真是眼巴巴地羡慕。可是光羡慕又有啥用呢？还是得要行动起来呀！业务一时开展不起来至少可以先写写自己最近读的书。

艺术的慰藉

读书的乐趣之一是遇到共情，“哇，这人竟然和我想的一样！”更惊喜的是看到作者如何处理问题而受到启发：“竟然还可以这样！”这本书就是处处藏着这样的意外之喜。 今年真是艰难，疫情限制了行动自由，原本通过外界力量来规避的问题、转移的注意力都无处可藏，负面情绪常常猝不及防：孤独焦虑恐惧紧张。这个时候看到这本《艺术的慰藉》真是有种做心灵马杀鸡的感觉：如何排解负面情绪，如何应对工作上的倦怠期，如何处理亲密关系里的矛盾，如何解决实力配不上野心，如何平衡短期利益和长期利益，如何面对生命的结束等等。在作者口中，艺术不再高高在上遥不可及，而是无时不刻和我们的生活交融在一起，给人生的点点滴滴聊以慰藉。

“ 艺术是具有疗愈性的。亲近艺术的重点在于协助我们把人生过得更好，让我们找到更好的自我。艺术如果有这样的力量，原因是艺术这种工具能够矫正或者弥补我们的各种心理缺陷：

  1. 我们的健忘。我们常忘记什么才是真正重要的，我们无法把握重要但稍纵即逝的体验。
  2. 我们很容易失去希望：我们对人世的负面过于敏感。我们经常错失正当的成功机会，只因为看不见继续坚持特定事物的合理性。
  3. 我们倾向于觉得自己孤立无援、遭到迫害，原因是我们对于遭遇多少困难一般怀有不切实际的观点。我们太容易恐慌，总是误判自己遭遇的问题所带有的意义。我们很寂寞——不是因为我们没有说话的对象，而是因为我们周围的人无法秉持真诚与耐心去深切了解我们的辛苦。之所以会造成这样的结果，部分原因是我们呈现自身痛苦的方式——不论这样的痛苦是来自充满裂缝的感情关系，对别人的忌妒还是雄心壮志不得实现——通常显得可鄙而且羞耻。我们不但受苦，而且还觉得自己的苦难缺乏尊严。
  4. 我们缺乏平衡，也经常看不见自己最佳的方面。我们不只是一个人，而是由许多不同的自我构成，而且我们也发现这些自我有优劣之别。我们较佳的自我经常只在偶然的情况下出现，而且也都出现得太迟；在我们最崇高的抱负当中，我们总是摆脱不了意志力薄弱的问题。
  5. 我们很不容易了解：我们在自己眼中充满神秘，因此根本无法向别人说明自己是什么样的人，也无法因为自己认为适当的原因而获得别人喜欢。
  6. 我们排拒许多能带给我们重要收获的经验、民族、地方与时代，只因它们表面上看起来不合乎脾胃，无法引起我们的共鸣。我们的判断力总是肤浅又充满偏见。我们怀着强烈的防卫心态，而轻易为各种事物贴上“陌生”的标签。
  7. 我们因为熟悉而麻木，并且生活在一个强调光鲜亮丽的商业世界里。因此，我们经常对平凡单调的人生感到不满：总是担忧自己错过了真正的人生。

艺术这个工具的目的和价值，就是针对这七项心理缺陷为我们提供七种协助：

  1. 矫正记忆的缺陷：艺术能够把经验的果实变得令人难忘，而且还能不断以新面貌重现。
  2. 散播希望：艺术让我们随时都能看到令人愉悦开心的事物，因为艺术深知我们太容易陷入绝望。
  3. 呈现有尊严的哀愁：艺术提醒我们，哀愁在美好人生中也占有一席之地，因此我们不太会对自己遭遇的困难感到恐慌，而能够将这些困难视为高尚人生的一部分。
  4. 协助我们取得平衡：艺术以异常清晰的象征体现我们良好特性的本质，并且透过各种媒介展示于我们眼前，帮助我们重新平衡我们的本性，引导我们发挥自己最优秀的潜力。
  5. 引导我们认识自我：艺术能够帮助我们辨识出对我们具有核心重要性，却又难以形诸言词的事物。人性中有许多部分是言语难以形容的。我们可以拿起艺术作品，以困惑但认真的态度说：“这就是我。”
  6. 扩展我们的经验：艺术是他人的经验透过极度精致的方式累计而成的结果，并以美观而且井然有序的形态呈现出来。我们在艺术当中可以找到其他文化的显著范例，因此亲近艺术作品能够扩展我们对自己以及世界的概念。乍看之下，大部分的艺术作品似乎都只是显得“陌生”，但我们慢慢就会发现，这些作品里其实含有各种观念与态度，可让我们吸收内化，丰富自己的人生。我们改善自我所需的一切，并不是早就都已经在我们手边。 7.唤醒麻木的心灵：艺术能够剥开我们的外壳，把我们从习以为常的泥沼中拉出来，不再对自己周围的一切视而不见。借助艺术，我们能够找回原本的敏感度，以新眼光看待旧事物，也不再认定新奇与光鲜亮丽是唯一能够协助我们摆脱麻木的解决方案。”

欣赏一幅画除了欣赏画的内容构图光影之外，也是通过创作者的眼睛和引导去发现美和学习爱的过程。在艺术品中发现被我们忽略的自然之美，回忆起被我们遗忘的日常之美。欣赏艺术品的过程也是让我们变得更耐心，更关注细节，更有好奇心的过程，而所有这一切都会让我们变成更好的爱人。艺术也通过悲伤和苦难的场景提醒人们，苦难和不遂乃生活常态，获得幸福的道路充满荆棘，既要有不断反思调整的智慧，更重要的是常心怀感恩。

嫉妒通常被贴上负面的标签，然而如果深挖一下，弄清楚产生嫉妒的具体是哪些特质，嫉妒的对象反而会变成学习的榜样和自我成长的抓手。

艺术能够向平凡人生中难以捉摸的真实价值致敬。能够教导我们以更加公正的态度看待自己，让我们知道在既有的处境中已经尽了全力认真生活，从事着自己不一定热爱的工作，面对着中年的种种问题，解决着雄心壮志未能实现的挫折感，努力对我们心爱但烦躁易怒的配偶保持忠诚。相较于媒体以光鲜靓丽的方式呈现一般人难以企及的事物，艺术的效果恰恰相反；艺术能够让我们重新看见自己被迫接受的人生当中所存在的实际优点。

AI-generated translation.

At the beginning of the month, a friend sent me “Little Cabin,” a mini-program for borrowing printed books. From “Roaming Whale” and “Duozhuayu” to “Little Cabin,” watching other people build the things I have always wanted to build fills me with helpless envy. But what good is envy by itself? At some point you still have to act. Even if the actual business cannot get off the ground yet, I can at least start by writing about the books I’ve been reading recently.

Art as Therapy

One of the pleasures of reading is encountering resonance—“Wow, this person thinks exactly what I was thinking!” Even more delightful is seeing how an author handles a question and feeling illuminated: “So it can be done like this too!” This book is full of that kind of pleasant surprise.

This year has been hard. The pandemic restricted movement, and the problems that used to be avoided or softened by outside distractions suddenly had nowhere to hide. Negative emotions often arrived without warning: loneliness, anxiety, fear, tension. Reading Art as Therapy at such a moment felt like getting a massage for the soul. How do we relieve negative emotions? How do we face burnout at work? How do we handle conflict in intimate relationships? How do we deal with ambitions that outstrip our actual abilities? How do we balance short-term interests with long-term ones? How do we face the end of life? In the author’s telling, art is no longer lofty and remote. It is woven into daily life at every moment, offering small consolations for all the little troubles of living.

“Art is therapeutic. The point of drawing near to art is to help us live better lives and become better versions of ourselves. If art has such power, it is because art, as a tool, can correct or compensate for our various psychological deficiencies:

  1. Our forgetfulness. We often forget what is truly important, and we fail to hold on to experiences that matter but pass by quickly.
  2. Our tendency to lose hope. We are overly sensitive to the negative side of life. We often miss rightful chances for success simply because we cannot see why something is worth continuing.
  3. Our tendency to feel isolated and persecuted, because we hold unrealistic ideas about how much difficulty a person should have to bear. We panic too easily and misjudge the meaning of our problems. We are lonely—not because we have no one to talk to, but because the people around us are unable to understand our suffering with honesty and patience. Part of the problem lies in how our pain appears—whether it comes from a fractured relationship, jealousy of others, or frustrated ambition, it often looks petty and shameful. We suffer, and then we feel our suffering lacks dignity.
  4. Our lack of balance, and our inability to see our best sides. We are not just one person but many selves, and some of those selves are better than others. Our better selves often appear only by accident, and too late; even in our noblest aspirations, weakness of will follows us.
  5. Our difficulty in understanding ourselves. We remain mysterious even to ourselves, and therefore cannot explain who we are to others or win their affection for the reasons we ourselves find most meaningful.
  6. Our rejection of many experiences, peoples, places, and eras that might have offered us important gains, simply because on the surface they seem uncongenial and fail to resonate. Our judgment is shallow and full of prejudice. We become defensive and too quickly label things as “foreign.”
  7. Our numbness through familiarity, combined with living in a commercial world obsessed with brightness and novelty. As a result, we often grow dissatisfied with ordinary, repetitive life and worry that we are missing the “real” one.

The purpose and value of art, then, is to offer seven corresponding forms of help:

  1. To correct the defects of memory: art can make the fruit of experience unforgettable and keep presenting it again in fresh forms.
  2. To spread hope: art lets us keep seeing things that are delightful and heartening because it knows how easily we fall into despair.
  3. To present sorrow with dignity: art reminds us that sorrow has a legitimate place in a good life, so we are less likely to panic in the face of difficulty and more able to regard hardship as part of a noble life.
  4. To help us regain balance: art embodies our better qualities with unusual clarity and places them before us through different media, helping us rebalance our nature and draw out our best potential.
  5. To guide us toward self-knowledge: art helps us identify things that are centrally important to us but difficult to put into words. Much of human nature cannot be described in language. We may pick up a work of art and say, in a puzzled but serious way: ‘This is me.’
  6. To expand our experience: art is the accumulated result of other people’s experience, rendered with extraordinary refinement and presented in beautiful, ordered forms. Through art we encounter vivid examples from other cultures, and by approaching artworks we enlarge our sense of ourselves and of the world. At first, most works seem merely ‘strange,’ but gradually we discover that they contain ideas and attitudes we can absorb and make part of ourselves. Not everything we need for self-improvement is already at hand within our own lives.
  7. To wake our numb hearts: art strips away our shell and pulls us out of the swamp of habit, so we stop overlooking everything around us. With the help of art, we recover our sensitivity and can see old things with new eyes; we no longer assume that only novelty and glamour can rescue us from numbness.”

To appreciate a painting is not only to appreciate its subject, composition, light, or shadow; it is also to discover beauty and learn love through the eyes and guidance of its creator. In works of art we notice forms of natural beauty we once overlooked, and remember everyday beauty we had forgotten. The process of appreciating art also makes us more patient, more attentive to detail, and more curious—and all of that makes us better lovers. Art also reminds us through scenes of sorrow and suffering that hardship and frustration are normal parts of life; the road to happiness is full of thorns. What we need is not only the wisdom to keep reflecting and adjusting, but above all a grateful heart.

Jealousy is usually given a negative label. But if you dig more deeply and figure out exactly which qualities provoke jealousy, the object of jealousy can instead become a model to learn from and a handle for self-growth.

Art pays tribute to the elusive but genuine value hidden inside ordinary life. It teaches us to judge ourselves more fairly and to recognize that, within the circumstances already given to us, we have indeed been living seriously and doing our best—working at jobs we may not even love, dealing with all the troubles of middle age, facing the frustration of ambitions left unrealized, and trying to remain faithful to spouses we love but who can also be irritable and difficult. Compared with media, which packages unattainable things in bright and glamorous ways, art does the exact opposite: it helps us see again the actual merits in the life we have been forced to accept.